Posted on June 6, 2019
The Wando Welch Terminal in Charleston will operate for an additional 30 minutes during weekdays starting July 1 in a bid to improve terminal fluidity as container volumes increase in South Carolina.
The terminal will be open from 5 am to 5:30 pm on weekdays, the South Carolina Ports Authority (SCPA) said. Current gate hours for dry boxes are 6 am to 6 pm.
“We are adding earlier gate hours to provide motor carriers new options for avoiding peak hours normally used by passenger vehicles,” Barbara Melvin, SCPA’s chief operating officer, said. “We are aiming for more productivity and velocity through our terminals and feel this change supports that effort.”
Longer gate hours mean more containers moved per day, even if the net effect in Charleston is only an additional 30 minutes. Extra time each week means less of a chance that shippers incur demurrage penalties. Given the challenges presented by larger vessels and the increased density of those calls, any measure to maintain or improve terminal fluidity will be beneficial to shippers.
Data shows that Charleston could use the extra time. The Wando and North Charleston terminals handled nearly 1.9 million truck transactions in 2018, up 4.7 percent year over year, according to the SCPA. The Wando facility accounts for an overwhelming majority of those truck trips, although the port authority only provides combined data. Through April 2019, truck traffic is 2.6 percent higher than in the same period last year.
Container volumes are up at all major East Coast ports this year, despite import tariffs on Chinese-made goods that were recently increased from 10 percent to 25 percent. Charleston’s loaded container traffic rose 5 percent in the first quarter, according to PIERS, a sister product of JOC.com within IHS Markit. Volumes surged 10 percent in the port of Savannah, the largest in the Southeast, and 14 percent in the port of New York and New Jersey.
Ports up and down the East Coast are grappling with how to keep trucks moving as an increasing number of containers descend in single vessel calls. Unless terminal operators can properly manage the flow of cargo in and out of their facilities, trucks can bunch up, drivers can spend hours in line, chassis pools can become depleted, and shippers can incur demurrage penalties.
SCPA has a multi-prong approach to keeping turn times to less than one hour. Other measures include converting to rail-mounted gantry cranes instead of manual pickers, and purchasing more post-Panamax cranes to quickly unload the larger vessels traversing the Panama Canal. Between June 1 and June 6, six out of 18 vessels scheduled in Charleston are post-Panamax vessels that would have been unable to fit through the old Panama Canal. Of those, two have more than 13,000 TEU of capacity.
Among East Coast ports, Portsmouth’s Virginia International Gateway opens the earliest, running from 4 am to 6 pm, while Norfolk International Terminals opens an hour later. However, truckers cannot enter the Virginia terminals without a reservation until 2 pm. Other major terminals, such as Maher Terminals and APM Terminals in New Jersey, and Garden City in Savannah, open at 6 am, while cutoffs range between 5 pm and 7 pm.
Savannah handles more than 2.8 million gate transactions annually, about a million more than Charleston after combining the Wando Welch and North Charleston terminals. It has 50 truck gates compared with 29 in Charleston.
Contact Ari Ashe at ari.ashe@ihsmarkit.com and follow him on Twitter: @arijashe.
Source: joc.com
