THE POSITION at the Durban container terminal is now critical, says Ed Little, executive director of the
South African Association of Freight Forwarders (SAAFF), with 11 561 containers waiting to be loaded last Friday (December 3, 1999).
As this issue of FTW went to press on Monday morning, both SAAFF and South African Chamber of Business (SACOB) officials were arranging urgent meetings with Portnet and Transnet.
We were told that Transnet's managing director Saki Macozoma couldn't see us before December 14 but that is too late, and we are hoping to see him before the end of the week, said SACOB infrastructure manager Peggy Drodskie.
With 25-30 vessels arriving in Durban every week, the present situation can only be aggravated, says Little.
Importers have been asked to remain open after hours to accept containers and minimise dwell times in the depot. One problem here is that even though Portnet has diverted some vessels to Cape Town, there is a Spoornet ban on overtime which isn't helping.
As a result containers unloaded in Cape Town on Friday, which should have travelled to Johannesburg during the weekend, had to sit in Cape Town until Monday morning.
Vessel delays at the terminal were 16-17 hours last weekend, a figure which had been showing a gradual upward trend during the previous week.
Exports at the rail terminal are continuing to build up with an average of 12 trains daily waiting outside the Kings Rest marshalling yard and around 450-500 containers waiting to be offloaded. Imports through the rail yard at the same time have averaged 250-300 containers daily.
Road transport vehicles have been moving at a slightly faster rate through the terminal, where an improvement of up to 30 minutes during the previous week was recorded. As a result a total of 1711 containers moved in and out of the gate last Thursday, some 100 per day.
With factories due to close next week (December 15), demurrage costs are likely to be high for containers not collected during the closure period, a factor which both SAAFF and SACOB intend addressing.
The diverting of ships also impacts on marine insurance and extra time costs, which shippers are not happy about and which will have to be dealt with, says Drodskie.
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