mr. christianson has fixed cost if you will. he mentioned the magic words, panama and canada.is about competition. this is about if we're going to make improvements necessary to move our product cost effectively or whether that business is going to go to can do or via the panama canal. do you support further freight efforts at the federal level? >> just as surely as we're sitting here, as we see international trade continue to increase and we are now at levels that are peaking over the pre-recession levels, we'll certainly be seeing bottlenecks develop. as i mentioned in my testimony the strategies are infrastructure efficiency with technology infused along with operational efficiency. i believe the legislation is timely. it's critical to the future of our supply chain optimization and we would hope to be able to continue to collaborate with you and your team on that because it's it's critical to be looking ahead. infrastructure bottlenecks don't go away after you recognize them. it takes years of funding and policy to solve these bottlenecks as they come up. >> your testimony

mr. christianson. you all have accommodated the big ships from asia. and soon in a year or two when the panama canal has completed the expansion, they'll come to the east coast. you want to give any quick pointers what we could do that you've learned, lessons learned on handling those huge, huge containerships? >> senator nelson, thank you for the question. it is -- they are a game-changer. but the term of big ship is a changing term. when i started working in the port about ten years ago, a big ship was 8,000 teus. in 2012 the port of long beach started handling 14,000 teu ships. about the same time the new locks in the panama canal were going into construction, which can atom date a 13,000 teu ship. the ships we're handling now in the san pedro bay ports will not fit in the new locks on the new panama canal. we are customers at the port of long beach are ordering 20,000 teu ships. so it is very much a moving target. to our colleagues on the east coast they're already dealing with this with ships that are transiting the suez canal. it has to do with d