The Omaha area is home to seven companies among the Fortune 500 and 1,000.
The much-publicized theft of goods from trains at the Port of Los Angeles has chugged its way into a Nebraska courthouse.
A Singapore company, Ocean Network Express, has sued Omaha-based Union Pacific over packages it says were lost or stolen during the pandemic, when train traffic slogged amid supply-chain slowdowns.
Stolen from the trains’ cargo containers: solar panels and a big shipment of L-arginine, an amino acid used to build protein, according to the lawsuits.
Ocean Network Express, identified in court documents as ONE, said it lost $166,000 worth of the amino acid after contracting with Union Pacific in June 2021 to transport it from St. Louis to the Los Angeles port, where it would then be shipped to Shanghai, China.
“The container was found at Los Angeles with doors open, the seal of the container having been breached during Union Pacific’s rail carriage of it,” the lawsuit alleges.
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In its second lawsuit, ONE said it was shipping 360 pieces of solar panels from China to Salt Lake City, via the Port of Los Angeles, on March 28, 2021.
On June 7, 2021, the lawsuit says, Union Pacific found the container breached and the solar panels gone. Total loss: $16,000.
“The panels were pilfered during Union Pacific’s custody of the container,” the lawsuit alleges.
Union Pacific has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit. A spokesman said Thursday that railroad officials are “aware of the lawsuits filed by Ocean Network Express and are still reviewing the information.”
ONE’s lawsuits concern a fraction of at least $5 million in inventory theft/losses that Union Pacific reported in 2021. The railroad giant transports billions of dollars in goods each year.
After video and photos showed piles of packages strewn alongside the tracks in the Port of Los Angeles in December, Union Pacific said it was considering bypassing the port. In a December letter to the Los Angeles County district attorney, the railroad said it had experienced a 160% increase in rail theft in Los Angeles County in 2021. In the last three months of 2021, the railroad said, an average of 90 containers were compromised per day.
The railroad, which has its own police force and 1,600 employees covering 275 miles of railroad track in Los Angeles County, said it was contemplating diverting traffic to avoid “organized and opportunistic criminal theft.” Railroad employees sometimes found themselves in confrontations with looters, leading to assaults and safety concerns, the railroad said.
The railroad called on Los Angeles police and prosecutors to do more to combat the crime. In January, railroad officials said they were “making headway” in stopping criminals in their tracks.
