FreightWaves
July 15, 2023
Kaylee Nix and Anthony Smith
Kaylee Nix and Anthony Smith host the show as the strike is over in Canada with a labor deal reached yesterday with guest Paul Brashier, VP of drayage and intermodal at ITS Logistics.
What are some of the big impacts we are going to see immediately after this?
“We have two weeks of freight sitting in Vancouver and Prince Rupert that need to get out. The biggest concern in the near term is going to be getting drivers into the ports and getting that freight out of the terminals. We did increase the amount of drivers and increased the amount of containers that need to get out. We are going to be looking to get as much of that freight out as possible and then our hope is that because the trucking community and the shipping community were the cause of this, we will get some alleviation of demurrage and free time to get those out. Then the next thing we will be looking at is all the IPI that is coming into those ports that are going to the Detroit and Chicago and the Midwest. They are all going to start arriving at the same time and there is already some capacity issues for chassis and some congestion that we are seeing in Chicago. There is also going to be a concern that a lot of these containers will show up and they will sit. You have 24-48 hour that you usually get from the ramps to get that freight out. If you don’t get that freight out then there is the storage charges that could accumulate there. We are hoping that the rail providers to the ramp operators will also extend some free time to get that freight out, to make sure that trucking community and BCOs are not footing the bill for this impasse that could not get resolved last two weeks.” said Paul Brashier VP of drayage and intermodal at ITS Logistics.
Prior to the decision that was dropped this morning. We hard news yesterday from John Smither from RailState who brought an interesting perspective on what the actual health of port of Vancouver and Prince Rupert looked like. Their data showed that volumes at Prince Rupert continuously or just dropped to zero at the first of the month and have been at zero completely flatlined since then. We are now hearing response from Canadian nationals saying this is going to take us weeks possibly months to undo. Can you talk about now some of those trickle down effects when you are looking at port health and also from those rail lines that directly feed into Vancouver and Prince Rupert?
Listen to the full interview here.
