Posted on February 9, 2017
By Rob Ward, JOC.com
Brazil’s third-largest container port is finally getting the funding it urgently needs for emergency dredging as the Itajai Port Authority announced the port handled more than 1 million twenty-foot-equivalent units.
The 39 million reais ($12.5 million) will help bring the operational draft of the Itajaí-Açu River back down to 12.5 meters from the current 10.5 meters after the loss of draft that resulted from serious flooding in October 2015. The lost draft forced ships to leave port with roughly 1,600 fewer TEUs and cost port users around 1.8 billion reais in lost revenue, said Marcelo Werner Salles, port authority CEO.
The dredging work will begin “within the next 30 days,” said transport minister Mauricio Quintella on a recent visit to the port. DTA Engenharia has been awarded the contract to dredge 4 million cubic liters of sediment within two months from the date work starts.
Although Itajai suffered from draft restrictions, the 12 percent growth year-over-year to 1.1 million TEUs revealed by provisional figures means that Itajai is still a very competitive port, Salles said.
That growth put Itajai within just a few hundred TEUs of its closest rival, Paranagua.
“The latest figures have pushed us over 1 million TEUs again and hopefully we can reproduce the rapid growth of previous years, which marked the importance of the container sector to the local and state economies,” said Salles. Itajai handled 984,000 TEUs in 2015 after handling 1 million TEUs in each of the previous six years.
Shippers, who were extremely frustrated with the lack of government action to restore the draft, were quite pleased with the announcement of dredging funding.
“We welcome these upgrades, which will bolster Itajai’s role as a container hub port and give better and cheaper options to our exporters,” said Glauco José Côrte, the President of the Federation of Industries for the State of Santa Catarina, a shippers’ association. “The expansion of the dredging will allow the entry of larger ships, and each meter of dredging means 800 more 20-foot containers that the ships can carry.”
The association also welcomed news that the central government pledged to invest in a highway linking the port city of Itajai with the Navegantes airport, which will also receive upgrades.
Source: JOC
