Port allows gearless ships

Chittagong: Gearless vessels will be allowed from now on in the port according to a decision of the Chittagong Port Authority (CPA) taken on Thursday.

Earlier, the CPA informed the owners that gearless vessels, which require the service of gantry cranes, would not be allowed at the port until the conflict between the dock workers and the private operating company was resolved.

However, the gantry crane operation has resumed since November 29 following the CPA's decision to operate those cranes by its own operators instead of the hired private operators.

CPA high officials said that they had reviewed the developments and decided to continue gantry crane operation by their operators.
'We took the decision not to bar gearless vessels any longer in order to keep our gantry cranes operational and expedite the container handling at the port', a CPA official said.

'We saw the productivity of container handling. It is much higher in the case of CPA's own operators than that of the private operators. As we want uninterrupted port operation so this decision was taken,' the official added.

The owners of gearless vessels had earlier rejected the request made by the port officials to halt gearless vessels at the port due to existence of a large number of scheduled bookings.

'How will we stop movement of a particular type of vessel when we have of cargoes to be loaded and unloaded to-and-from Chittagong?,' Fazlul Hoque, general manager of Continental Trading who is the local agent of gearless vessel of Eagle Pioneer.

'However, some five gearless vessels have submitted declaration to berth at the port as on Thursday night and two more had sailed for Chittagong from Singapore,' CPA radio control and shipping sources claimed.

Currently, some 11 gearless vessels that require gantry cranes to discharge and load cargoes, are plying to and from Chittagong port and other ports in Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Singapore.
Meanwhile, the importers took delivery of around 1300 Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) Thursday and 1473 TEUs on the previous day.

A total of 11 container vessels were in operation at different CPA jetties as on Thursday at 8:30pm. Of these, seven vessels were loading export consignments while four were discharging import cargoes.

Two container vessels sailed out from the port on the day while three arrived during day-time navigation and three more vessels are scheduled to arrive during late hours .
A total of 15 container vessels are waiting at the outer anchorage.

The port had a stockpile of 17,800 TEUs of containers against its capacity for 14500 TEUs at different yards on Thursday.
The officials of the CPA Traffic Department as per its earlier decision were providing round-the-clock service to both the importers and exporters to facilitate early release of the backlog cargoes.