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The three-day ILA strike, watched ship by ship

mechanism · 2024-09-24 → 2024-10-11 · verdict: CONFIRMED AT DAILY GRAIN

What was registered, before the data was touched

East Coast berthing stops Oct 1–3 2024; a pre-strike front-load appears in late September; a backlog surge follows the settlement.

What the record shows

Monthly customs data could only show a −1% smudge for October. The daily physics shows the whole event: 56 East Coast berthings on September 25 — the front-load, real but compressed into days, invisible at monthly grain — then 1, 2 and 5 berthings on October 1–3 as the strike closed the coast, then 17 on October 5 as the backlog cleared. One event, two instruments, and only the fast one could resolve it: this is the cleanest demonstration in the atlas of why the ledger pairs customs records with AIS observation.

56 28 09-20: 6 berthings09-21: 21 berthings09-22: 7 berthings09-23: 10 berthings09-24: 15 berthings09-25: 56 berthings09-26: 27 berthings09-27: 16 berthings09-28: 24 berthings09-29: 15 berthings09-30: 27 berthings10-01: 1 berthings10-02: 2 berthings10-03: 5 berthings10-04: 6 berthings10-05: 17 berthings10-06: 4 berthings10-07: 9 berthings10-08: 7 berthings10-09: 6 berthings10-10: 7 berthings10-11: 10 berthings 10 09-2009-3010-11
Container-ship berthings per day at NY-NJ, Savannah, Charleston and Norfolk, from 7 years of NOAA AIS. Strike: Oct 1–3.

What would prove this wrong

Normal berthing counts (15–30/day) continuing through Oct 1–3 would have falsified the strike’s operational bite entirely.

Cite this

In print: “The three-day ILA strike, watched ship by ship” — a pre-registered event study by the Trimtab US Trade Ledger, ruled 2026-08-06, from US Census port records and 174,440 vessel stays (NOAA AIS, 2018–2024) — trimtabist.com/atlas/ila-strike-daily
For the record: Event Atlas · ila-strike-daily · CONFIRMED AT DAILY GRAIN · ruled 2026-08-06

This study is a frozen artifact: the ruling and its exhibits do not change when new data lands. If the verdict is ever revised, the revision is printed here with its reason, and the original stays on the record.

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