Port’s ‘big Legoland’ spins, heaves chugs and toward zero-emissions goal

Anthony Otto remembers growing up in Long Beach when the smog was so bad it hurt his lungs to breathe polluted air after an active play day.

That’s why he is especially pleased today as CEO of the Long Beach Container Terminal at the Port of Long Beach that it is considered to be the greenest terminal in North America and one of the greenest in the world. The state-of-the-art terminal is well on its way of achieving itsformidable goal of zero emissions by 2030.

“I am so proud of what we’ve accomplished so far in reducing pollution at the port and the surrounding neighborhoods,” Otto said recently on a tour of the Container Terminal with my wife and I and photographer Howard Freshman.

Otto was born at Long Beach Memorial Hospital in 1963 and attended Cubberley Elementary School, DeMille Middle School and Millikan High School.

The tour we took was an eye opener. We agreed with Bonnie Nixon, director of sustainability for LBCT, who said she never gets tired of taking people on tours of the terminal.

“It’s like being in a big Legoland,” she said. “There are so many moving pieces. The terminal feels very alive and resilient.”

The terminal is a maze of fully electrified cranes, including dual-transaction stacking cranes and intermodal rail cranes. Otto said the terminal is equipped to handle almost half the regular freight traffic of the Port of Long Beach. The automated tandem lift can handle two containers at a time, the only such lift in use in North America.

I was immediately amazed by the driverless truck chassis roaming around on the pavement, carrying hundreds of containers to and from a cargo ship. To ensure safety, humans are kept out of this massive area of moving vehicles by fencing.

These driverless vehicles, called electrified container transports, run on huge batteries that are recharged daily inside a building, the largest of its kind in the world for recharging batteries. All recharging operations are run by robotic computers.

My wife was awed by the massive size of the cargo ship and the cranes which were simultaneously loading and unloading hundreds of containers. It seemed that not a second was wasted at the terminal.

Thinking as an art teacher, now retired, she also found the primary color palette of red, blue and yellow very striking on the equipment.

What you don’t see are a lot of longshoremen working at the docks. Instead of operating heavy equipment in traditional dock work, these workers–men and women–have moved inside buildings and have been trained on using computers to control various robotic operations at the terminal.

Nixon said there are 620 workers at the terminal, a higher number than before new equipment was purchased.

One of those workers is Eric Zeutzius of Huntington Beach, who went from a crane mechanic to an automation clerk in an operations center monitoring activity outside. “It keeps me busy,” he said, while looking at multiple computer screens.

Another employee we met was Lynn Aranola of San Pedro, who troubleshoots problems with trucks entering or leaving the facility. While she was there, she was helping a truck driver with a paperwork problem.

The LBCT Middle Harbor redevelopment project is combining two aging shipping terminals into the greenest, most technologically advanced container terminal in the world, Otto said.

The new terminal, when fully built out, will have more than double the capacity of the terminals it replaces and cut air pollution by more than half, he said. Construction started in 2011 and the first phase of the new terminal opened in 2016.

LBCT has already invested $2.5 billion in this project, but there still is much more to be done to reach the net zero emissions goal by 2030, Otto said.

“Our $2.5-billion investment has paid off for the economy, the surrounding communities, and the environment,” he said. He added that in the last seven years LBCT has gone from moving 700,000 containers–20-foot equivalent units, or TEUs– to 3.3 million TEUs while reducing emissions and energy dependence on fossil fuels by more than half.

Otto also said LBCT continued to have the fastest truck turn-around times, the shortest berth stays and the lowest anchorage rates of any terminal in San Pedro Bay.

In addition to dealing with technological changes and zero emission strategies, LBCT also is working closely with issues in the community, Nixon said.

She said there were four prongs to LBCT’s plans in the community:

–Working with the educational system, including Jordan, Cabrillo and Poly High Schools, Long Beach City College and Cal State Long Beach. LBCT mentors students and helps them find jobs.

–Helping the homeless with food, clothing and other services.

–Partnering with groups, such as the Aquarium of the Pacific, to improve the environment.

–Working with community organizations, such as Coalition for Clean Air, Long Beach Alliance for Children with Asthma, West Long Beach Association, Earthjustice and East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice.

After the tour, Otto said the air in Long Beach today “is a far cry better than when I was going to school here. Clean air is so important to so many people. I am proud that I am able to give back as much as I can and improve the air in our community.”

For more information on tours at LBCT, contact Bonnie Nixon, director of sustainability at: bonnie.nixon@lbct.com.