Los Angeles Harbor

A tentative settlement was reached Wednesday after a one-day strike by security guards that halted about 70% of the loading and unloading of ships in the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. More than 50 security guards belonging to the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union set up picket lines at seven terminals in the Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor on Tuesday, officials said. Members of other locals of the union refused to cross the picket lines.

The weather-beaten lighthouse that has stood sentry at the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor for nearly 100 years is getting a fresh start. Beginning this week, more than $1.8 million will be spent repainting the Angels Gate lighthouse and shoring up its eroding exterior. The lighthouse, which continues to blink out warnings to passing boaters, has been in decline for years, its paint peeling, iron gates rusting and damaged cornice hanging limply. The remodeling is designed to shore up the lighthouse by metalizing its base and repairing the holes in its stucco tower.

Los Angeles Harbor, which had a promising season hindered by injuries to its best two running backs, recovered to end on a positive note Saturday. The Seahawks beat Orange Coast, 9-3, in the K-Swiss Classic Saturday at Los Angeles Harbor. L.A. Harbor (8-3) scored on its first two possessions, then relied on a determined defense that limited OCC to minus-one yard in total offense in the first half, and 131 yards in the game.

Voters in the Harbor area may be feeling a touch of election fatigue. In July, they cast votes in a special congressional election that sent Democrat Janice Hahn to Washington. In early November, they'll be asked to go to the polls again, this time to choose Hahn's successor on the Los Angeles City Council. Already, brightly colored campaign signs dot the district, which includes San Pedro, Wilmington, Harbor Gateway and Watts. The flurry of endorsements and campaign mailers is well underway.

In many ways, it's an environmentalist's dream. Every day, the giant machine hammers hundreds of tons of discarded cars, refrigerators and other junk into fist-sized chunks, turning mountains of metal refuse into valuable scrap for export. But water-quality officials say the metal-shredding plant on Terminal Island has a dark side. As Hugo Neu-Proler Co.

Port officials and the U.S. Coast Guard, hoping to prevent ships from running aground in the nation's busiest seaport, have agreed on guidelines that specify underwater clearances for vessels in Los Angeles and Long Beach harbors. Under maritime law, the guidelines carry no enforcement powers and are merely advisory for the masters of the 7,000 ships that call on the ports each year.

For the 24 Russian sailors who have been stranded in Los Angeles Harbor for the past three months, the voyage to America has been one unlucky break after another. Their luck took another turn for the worse recently when a relief expedition sent from Russia reportedly made it only as far as Mexico City before turning around and heading home, leaving the hapless Russian sailors still stranded in the harbor aboard their ship, the Gigant.

In a move praised for its potential economic and environmental benefits, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday moved toward closing the city's troubled Terminal Island sewage treatment plant so that millions of gallons of waste can be treated each day at a larger facility in Carson.

Smugglers crammed 50 undocumented immigrants into a 44-foot luxury sailboat built for eight passengers and attempted to sneak into the Port of Los Angeles in what authorities described as the harbor's largest maritime smuggling operation in a decade. Acting on an anonymous tip, the Coast Guard converged on the boat Monday night, several days after the C'est La Vie had been rented from a local charter company.

Wilmington community activists, who have been pressing the Harbor Department to expand a waterfront area set aside for redevelopment, got half of what they wanted from harbor commissioners Wednesday. The commissioners voted to expand the project area by eight to 10 acres but did not include the former Heinz Pet Food Cannery building. "They did exactly what we anticipated they would do," said George De La Torre, chairman of the Wilmington Community Citizens Advisory Committee.

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, long known as America's gateway for imported goods, are trying to generate more export business as the international trade sector struggles to regain its sea legs. The mission is vital for the twin ports and the thousands of people who work on the docks as well as for trucking companies, warehouses and logistics businesses in Southern California: A new report shows that the local ports' reliance on foreign toys, clothing and other products heightened the region's economic suffering when the global recession squeezed the flow of imports, while ports with more balanced operations fared better and now are recovering more quickly.

Southern California air regulators proposed tougher rules Friday to ensure that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach reduce their share of deadly emissions from ships, trains, big rigs and cargo-handling equipment, prompting harsh objections from harbor officials. The so-called backstop rules, unveiled during a South Coast Air Quality Management District governing board meeting in Long Beach, would enable regulators to enforce the voluntary pollution reduction targets set by the ports to control soot and smog over the next decade and impose financial penalties if needed.

The Port of Los Angeles, the nation's busiest container port, is negotiating with an alternative-fuel vehicle manufacturer to purchase and evaluate the company's heavy-duty, zero-emission trucks, which use a hydrogen fuel cell hybrid electric power system. The company is Vision Industries Corp. of Florida, doing business as Vision Motor Corp. in California. Vision's research and development facility is in El Segundo and its manufacturing plant is in Whittier, said its president and chief executive, Martin Schuermann.

The nation's two busiest cargo container ports -- Los Angeles and Long Beach -- ended a terrible year in international trade with strong December numbers that might signal the beginning of a long-awaited economic rebound. The Port of Los Angeles, which ranks first in the U.S., handled 562,990 cargo containers last month, a tiny increase of 0.35% over the 561,033 recorded in the same month a year earlier. The increase was driven by a huge 40.2% increase in exports, which climbed to 153,836 containers from 109,704 a year earlier.

Not too long ago, the 10,500-acre complex at the southern tip of Los Angeles County wasn't just the home of the nation's busiest seaports, it was the graveyard where old trucks went to die. Dented, rusting 1988-and-older rigs hauled cargo containers to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, earning the harbor the nickname of "diesel death zone." On Jan. 1, the neighboring ports cruised past a major pollution-fighting milestone, banning trucks made before 1994 and those that don't meet at least 2004 emissions standards -- trucks such as the 15-year-old Freightliner once owned by Guido Perez.

Southern California's twin ports make up the nation's biggest cargo container hub -- and they're launching an ambitious campaign to stay that way as they navigate a weak economic recovery and increasing competition from foreign and domestic harbors. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are aggressively advertising and giving customers discounts at a time when they and most other U.S. ports are wrapping up their worst ever year-over-year decline in shipping business. In 2009, the two ports moved about 2.5 million fewer containers than the year before, the equivalent of shutting down the country's fourth-busiest seaport -- Savannah, Ga. -- for the entire year.

It's chilly and hard to see at 4 a.m. as Martin Maher throttles up his turbocharged work boat against the swells. He is set to rendezvous with a Chinese container ship three miles beyond the Port of Los Angeles breakwater. His mission: Deliver a port pilot to guide the incoming container ship through the labyrinth of narrow channels and turn basins in the nation's busiest harbor complex. Scanning the horizon with an unblinking squint, Maher spins the Stephen M. White's 36-inch chrome wheel to swing around to the side of the Chinese ship, longer than three football fields.

Air pollution from U.S.-flagged oil tankers and cargo vessels will be reduced by about 80% under new engine and fuel standards finalized Tuesday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a move that could improve Los Angeles' air quality. The new standards, however, will apply only to existing U.S.-flagged ships, which account for about 10% of the vessels that visit U.S. ports each year. The vast majority of the estimated 6,000 large ships that berth annually at the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex are foreign-flagged.

It's chilly and hard to see at 4 a.m. as Martin Maher throttles up his turbocharged work boat against the swells. He is set to rendezvous with a Chinese container ship three miles beyond the Port of Los Angeles breakwater. His mission: Deliver a port pilot to guide the incoming container ship through the labyrinth of narrow channels and turn basins in the nation's busiest harbor complex. Scanning the horizon with an unblinking squint, Maher spins the Stephen M. White's 36-inch chrome wheel to swing around to the side of the Chinese ship, longer than three football fields.