LA neighborhood becomes temporary storage space for empty shipping containers as the crowded port situation continues

Residents of a neighborhood in Los Angeles are up in arms over shipping containers finding a temporary home along their residential streets as trucking companies work to tackle the backups from ports. 

According to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, the recent move to 24/7 operations at the Port of LA has cut the number of cargo sitting on the dock for more than 13 days in half, but now there’s a new problem – what to do with the shipping containers once they are empty. 

For trucking company UCTI, located in the Wilmington neighborhood of LA, the answer lies on the residential streets surrounding their property. 

“I would have to go in at 6:30 a.m. to go to work. There was a trailer already blocking my driveway so I couldn’t get out. With no driver in the trailer, so we would honk and honk, and it was just crazy,” said Sonia Cervantes, who lives along Anaheim Street, right next to UCTI trucking. 

UCTI Trucking owner Frank Arrierran says that his company only has space for 65 containers, but the port situation has them working with far more than that at a time. Arrieran says he doesn’t have much choice but to leave the containers along the street, just temporarily. 

“Right now with the ports and everything that’s going on over there, we’re stuck with the containers, having to bring them all to the yard, and we only have so much space,” Arrieran said to CBS Los Angeles.

“They’re sitting in the street for like 15, 20 minutes,” Cervantes explained. “Sometimes they just unload the trailer in the street with no front part of it, and they just leave it there.”

“We’ve been messed with tickets and being harassed,” Arrerian said. “We ask the community to help us, because we’re only in the middle.”

Arrierran says he plans to meet with city officials some time this week in hopes that they will help his company relocate to a bigger yard.