THINGS AT the Port of Durban were "pretty much back to normal" in the first week of January, according to John Hyde of Portnet's port operations division. Average ship delays were down to about 12 to 15-hours; even the longer delays for some ships were down to less than half the previous top levels of over 100-hrs; crane working rates had got up as high as 18 containers per hour on occasions; and the Durban container terminal (DCT) had less than 12 000 waiting containers in stock. Nolene Lossau, executive director of the SA Shippers' Council (SASC), suggested that the council's members were "somewhat happier" about the way things were going in the first week of the year. It's an improvement on the utter logjam that was threatening in December during the pre-Christmas rush period, which immediately followed the workers' strike shutdown of the port. "They actually worked on Christmas Day in Durban," Lossau told FTW. "And, although this was on ships only, it helped to bring down the delays to more acceptable levels." The DCT also went from a stock of over twelve-and-a-half thousand waiting containers in December to a January 2 figure of about eleven-and-a-half thousand. "The minute they can get the containers in the terminal down in numbers, they become more efficient," she added.
