It’s a problem South Carolina ports have been lucky enough to avoid until now: The supply chain crisis has hit the Charleston ports.
There are now 25,000 import containers are sitting at the Charleston ports, including 2,000 that have been there for more than 30 days.
Jim Newsome, president and CEO of the South Carolina Ports Authority says these delays started back in early November.
"We had a crane ship in port for five days from November 8 to November 12. That essentially backs that that means we forego about five ships that would normally work that berth in that time, so we started getting behind there," says Newsome.
Newsome believes he has a plan to fix it.
"It's basically a function of maximizing the amount of cranes and labor that we can put on a ship to get them in and out as fast as possible and encouraging everybody to really tighten up the time frames between when a ship leaves and a ship come so we pretty much constantly have ships at our docks," says Newsome.
He is confident the backlog will be cleared before Christmas.
Newsome hopes that more workers will be encouraged to work over the Christmas holidays, so they can avoid a second backlog later this month.