MICHELE NORRIS, host: Talking to folks is one way to gauge the nation's economic mood - or you could just open your ears and listen. NPR's Chana Joffe-Walt did just that at the port of Seattle.</s>CHANA JOFFE-WALT: Here it is, a creepy, shocking, unnerving sound. Okay, maybe you can't hear the drama here, but people who spend a lot of time on our nation's waterfronts hear this and it spooks them. This is the Seattle port. You stand here at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and you see empty ships, close to no human activity; and you hear almost nothing. Charla Scaggs(ph) at the Port of Seattle, she tells me normally, you'd hear tons of trucks.</s>Ms. CHARLA SCAGGS: Well, the trucks have a really deep, diesel- engine sound, kind of a - eerr.</s>CHANA JOFFE-WALT: She says you should also be hearing the sound of metal slamming into metal as the containers are taken off ships and stacked up. You should hear the cranes moving around the terminal - beep, beep, beep - and foghorns.</s>Ms. CHARLA SCAGGS: You know what a foghorn sounds like: honk.</s>CHANA JOFFE-WALT: And all those sounds, you wouldn't be hearing them one at a time; you'd hear them all at once.</s>CHANA JOFFE-WALT: But we're buying less, Europe is buying less, China is selling less, so import traffic at major ports was down 31 percent in February from the same month last year. And so instead, we hear this.</s>CHANA JOFFE-WALT: Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR News.
A drop in economic activity can literally be heard at the port of Seattle. The silence is deafening.