From the hills of San Pedro, Calif., you can see the problem firsthand: Towering cranes unload containerships at every available berth, and stacks of containers swell in the freight yards.  Loaded containerships occupy every available anchorage inside and outside the long seawall. The number of ships waiting to unload in recent weeks at the adjacent ports of Los Angeles…

Dozens of ships are waiting for berths off Los Angeles.  Puget Sound is so overloaded, rarely used anchorages have filled up.  And now, the cargo backlogs are spreading to the East Coast ports of Savannah and New York-New Jersey.  The Port of Virginia, meanwhile, continues to operate normally despite similar surges in cargo that have bedeviled other ports.  Joe Harris,…