Port of Oakland and the Slang Term of the Day

A bit of commercial shipping geekery to bore my readers.

While I was visiting the Bay Area, we passed by the Port of Oakland, with its huge cranes, stacks of shipping containers, and ships being loaded and unloaded. I wondered aloud whether the traffic in the port was increasing or decreasing over time--i.e., whether it was getting bypassed in favor of small-town-turned-into-shipping-container-yard or not. The intarweb to the rescue.

First, the Wikipedia article on the Port of Oakland states:

The Port of Oakland was the first major port on the Pacific Coast of the United States to build terminals for container ships. It is now the fourth busiest container port in the United States; behind Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Newark.

Container traffic greatly increased the amount of cargo loaded and unloaded in the Port; by the late 1960s, the Port of Oakland was the second largest port in the world in container tonnage. However, depth and navigation restrictions in San Francisco Bay limited its capacity, and by the late 1970s it had been supplanted by the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach as the major container port on the West Coast.

However, in the early 2000s, severe congestion at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach caused some trans-Pacific shippers to move some of their traffic over to Oakland (especially if the final destination is not in Southern California but lies farther east).

This is backed up by data from the Port of Oakland's website, which is graphed below:



Incidentally, TEU = twenty-foot equivalent units. Most of the containers you see out on the highway, about the same size as a semi box, are forty foot containers (=two TEUs); the "shorty" ones are twenty footers.

You can see the bump in imports starting around 2001. One thing that surprised me: total traffic is going up, but that's mostly because of imports and sending back empty cans: exports are mostly flat. Sounds like a trade deficit to me, huh?

Anyway, continuing my shipping containers geekery, I received a book off my Amazon wish list: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. So far, it's a pretty good read.

I am also watching The Wire, HBO's police drama series set in Baltimore, written by David Simon. He is the author of the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which was the basis of the TV series Homicide on NBC--he basically spent a year shadowing Baltimore homicide detectives, taking time off from his crime reporter position. I was a huge fan of the show, at least the early seasons--when the squad room was populated with realistic, fat, balding, white male detectives, instead of fashion model multiethnic eye candy. Anyway, The Wire addresses some more complex issues than you would expect for a run-of-the-mill crime drama:

Season three of THE WIRE examined the concept and nature of reform and the role of the political leadership in addressing a city's problems. Earlier themes included the death of the American working class, depicted in season two, and the inherent conflict between individuals and the modern institutions to which they are beholden, as seen in the protracted drug investigation that began in season one and continues into the third season.

The reason I bring it up is that Season Two is set in the Port of Baltimore, with the criminal investigation of the stevedore/longshoreman union, the rackets that they are running, and their struggle for survival against the gentrification of the harbor area.

As a side note, a lot of the characters in the series are drug dealers from the projects, so be warned that I might be subconsciously absorbing urban vernacular. If I start to say things like, "Dawg, all in the game yo, all in the game...." you should feel free to call me a chigga (the amusing slang term for the day; the meaning should be obvious if you're familiar with wigga).