'Escape California. Everyone Is Doing It': Gov. Greg Abbott Urges Cargo Ships To Set Sail For Texas Ports
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) — The bottleneck at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach have caused supply chain problems all over the country, but Gov. Greg Abbott seems to think the problem can be solved if those cargo ships just come to Texas.
Abbott on Wednesday invited companies to redirect their cargo ships that are waiting to get into the backlogged ports off California and send them to the Lone Star state's ports.
"Are your products stuck off Long Beach?" the video posted on Twitter asks. "Texas ports are wide open."
According to the ad, port delays are up to 100 days in California, but it would only take two weeks to sail to a Texas port off the Gulf of Mexico via the Panama Canal.
"Escape California. Everyone is doing it," the ad says, in an apparent reference to Tesla CEO Elon Musk's decision to relocate the company's headquarters to Austin.
About 40% of the nation's imports come through the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which are considered to be the gateway to and from Asia, where a huge variety of products are manufactured. According to Port of LA spokesman Phillip Sanfield, no other port in the country can match its dockworker force, warehousing space, rail connections, or infrastructure, which includes the water depth and cranes capable of handling the larger container ships in the world.
"There are ships that call LA/LB that are so big that they would not fit through the Panama Canal," Sanfield said in an email.
