Page 5 - atoday dec 23

U.S. NEWS A5
Wednesday 23 December

Shippers rush to deliver millions of holiday gifts

UPS workers guide a container across a floor containing casters people is hardly the largest York, Miami or Chicago.
after it was unloaded from an airplane at Worldport in Louisville, in the country. Best known It will stop in Kentucky. All
Ky. for its wooden baseball the boxes and envelopes
bats and being home to are unloaded, likely by col-
(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) the Kentucky Derby, the lege students pulling the
city does, however, have ultimate all-nighter — they
SCOTT MAYEROWITZ lined up miles away. Every relatively good weather make up 70 percent of the
AP Airlines Writer 60 seconds another plane and a geography that is employees here.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — The lands on one of the two perfect for shipping. (FedEx Next, the packages go
humming is constant; a parallel runways and pulls has a similar operation in onto conveyers where red
low-pitched drone from up to the facility — the size Memphis, Tennessee.) lasers scan labels and then
155 miles of conveyer belts of 90 football fields — to “It’s just an ideal location the system automatically
racing packages in every unload its goods. for us,” says Gary Kelley, sorts the boxes and directs
direction. Boxes shift from If everything goes right, the manager of the UPS next them to new shipping con-
one belt to another and packages are just touched day shipping division at tainers. UPS has 38,000 such
bump into a metal wall. twice by humans: first when Worldport. “We are within containers and they typi-
Thud. Thud. Thud. In the pulled out of large aircraft two hours (flying time) of 75 cally hold about 400 pack-
background, trucks beep shipping containers and percent of the population ages.
and jet engines roar. then again at the end of and within four hours of 95 Workers load them back up
Forget jingling bells and their journey through the percent.” and then drag the heavy
ho-ho-hos, these are now conveyors and into a new And when you are rushing containers across a floor
the sounds of the holidays. bin and another jet. packages overnight, that of rollers back onto vari-
As more gift-givers shop The past two years have proximity to the country’s ous planes that head out
online, there are more been rough for express largest cities matters. around the globe.
packages to ship. Online shippers. A plane from Seattle might Up to 416,000 packages
sales now account for 10 To prevent mishaps, UPS be carrying overnight can be processed each
percent of all shopping and FedEx have been packages bound for New hour.q
and 15 percent during working with major retailers
the holidays, according to hone their forecasts and
to research firm Forrester. have scheduled their ex-
That leaves FedEx and UPS tra holiday workers to better
with a combined 947 mil- meet the shipping spikes
lion packages to deliver right after Thanksgiving
between Black Friday and and the weekend before
Christmas Eve — up 8 per- Christmas. Some third-par-
cent from last holiday sea- ty tracking services have
son’s forecasts. signaled a few issues with
For UPS, the key to getting 2015 deliveries but UPS
all those last-second orders spokesman Mike Mangeot
delivered on time is World- said last week that more
port, a massive sorting than 96 percent of pack-
facility located between ages are being delivered
the Louisville airport’s two on time in December and
main runways. On a typical that UPS expects packag-
night, 1.6 million packages es to arrive by Christmas.
pass through. Just before “In many cases customers
Christmas, there can be 4 are receiving the pack-
million, peaking on Mon- ages earlier than promised
day night. as we are advancing de-
(UPS plans to deliver about liveries to make sure the
36 million packages on network remains ready for
Tuesday, its busiest day of any spikes as last-minute
the year, up from 35 million Christmas shipping ap-
last year. That includes all proaches,” says Mangeot.
of Worldport’s shipments At first glance, Kentucky
plus those traveling by doesn’t seem like the epi-
truck.) center of holiday shipping.
Standing next to the run- After all, Louisville isn’t the
ways just after midnight, geographic center of the
jet headlights can be seen U.S. And this city of 600,000