From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is a daily.

Today, a crisis in the global supply chain triggered by the pandemic was supposed to be

over by now. It's not creating economic havoc across the world.

Sabrina Tavrini's he spoke with our colleague Peter Goodman about why that is and what the crisis looks like at a single port.

It's Friday, October 15th.

So Peter, your beat is basically the global economy. And for months, we've been hearing about all these shortages, construction materials, office chairs, diapers.

And you've been trying to figure out why this is happening.

Right.

So where did you go to investigate this?

Well, I went to one of the central parts of the global supply chain that has been coming under tremendous stress. And that's ports. I went to the third largest container port in the United States, which is in Savannah, Georgia.

So because of our location, we have cargo coming to us through the Suez Canal. And you'll see that one of these slides and the Panama Canal.

I spent the day with the guy who's in charge, Griff Lynch, the executive director of the Georgia Port Authority. And I wandered around with him to try to sort of see the situation through his eyes. And what I saw was really quite astonishing.

So the port is a strikingly noisy place. I mean, you hear the clattering of machinery. You hear cranes lifting up containers and dropping them down onto the backs of trucks.

You hear some sounds that almost sound like music, strange, worrying and chiming. But the most astonishing thing was the sight of this yard, full of nearly 80,000 shipping containers.

That represents 50% more than usual. And that represents a tremendous backlog, just filling up acres and acres of land, waiting to be loaded onto ships, waiting to be loaded onto trucks, headed for their next stop.

The cranes are working as fast as they can to lift the containers off of ships and onto the land. And as we were speaking, I saw more ships.

So we have about 22 vessels at anchor right now anchored off the port as far away as 17 miles off the Atlantic, waiting for their turn to load or unload at one of the docs. And how long have they been here on average, the vessels at anchor would be somewhere between four to five days because there's been so much cargo just streaming into this port that even this giant port can't keep up. And before the pandemic, how many vessels would you have at anchor zero?

And normally somebody runs a port would be reassured by this site of business proceeding. And you could tell that Gryff Lynch was a little bit agitated.

Nobody has gone through what we're dealing with ever before. And so we are reinventing this as we go along. There is no day that is the same.

He was looking at the ships the way maybe somebody who's been trying to clean out their garage looks at the UPS truck pulling up to bring more stuff. Where am I going to put all those things?

We're in a ketchup mode. And there's a lot and not everybody's doing it because they don't have the space. Right. And what we're going to do.

He had this ultimate problem of trying to figure out where to put all this stuff.

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