COVID-19 – Shelter in Place

March 16, 2020

Six Bay Area counties (San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Alameda, and Marin) together issued a ‘Shelter in Place’ order this afternoon. The ‘Shelter in Place’ order will remain effective at least until April 7, 2020.

We understand that many customers are concerned about how services will be impacted. In order to comply with the ‘Shelter in Place’ order, Cargocentric core operations will begin working from home as of Tuesday, March 17, 2020. We will be answering emails and returning phone calls.

1.) Customs Clearance
Our Customs Entry department will continue business operations with employees working from home. Business should proceed as usual in this department. Our Customs Entry software allows us to remotely clear entries at any port in the United States. Customers should not experience any change in service in terms of our speed of entry filing.

One area of concern is whether or not CBP will be slower in responding to Customs holds. We are not yet sure which CBP departments the government will consider essential. We will need to see in the coming weeks if CBP processing of customs entries is impacted.

2.) Ocean Port operations
We confirmed that both SSA and ETS terminals in Oakland will remain open. This means containers arriving at these terminals are expected to come off vessels at their scheduled time. The assumption is that they will also be subject to the standard number of free time before storage begins to accumulate. Importers with FCL containers should be fully aware of this issue. If a customer is unable to receive freight during this time, they may be subject to storage fees.

We are still waiting to hear back from the various CFS warehouses.

3.) Airport operations at SFO Airport
We have checked with various airline cargo handling warehouses. As of late this afternoon, they have yet to announce whether they will remain open or shut down during the Shelter in Place order. We will continue to monitor this issue daily for any updates.

4.) Cargocentric Warehouse operations
“Mailing and shipping services” are considered “Essential Businesses.” As such, we will maintain a small operations staff to receive and ship out cargo from our warehouse.

We want to thank all our customers and partners for their kindness and patience in these challenging times. We will persevere and get through this together.