PORTS FELIXSTOWE
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The port of Felixstowe dominates UK container traffic, but despite a £45m investment in new equipment, surges in demand sometimes leave trucks cooling their wheels in queues for hours on end...
Having a truck standing around waiting to be loaded for hours on end is no joke—especially if you're not being paid for all that dead time. But it's a situation that some container hauliers going in and out of the port of Felixstowe say they've had to get used to over the past couple of months.
"On occasions you can sit there for two-anda-half hours before you tip," says Bill Foggo, a partner in West Thurrock, Essex-based ITS, which has 15 trucks almost exclusively dedicated to container work. "Then you go to another stand and you may have to wait a further hour before you get a container on. The waiting is costing us an absolute fortune," he adds. "It's (musing us mega-problems, and our profits are flowing down the drain."
"We've experienced hold-ups too, with lorries stuck there for five or six hours," says Kevin Steadman, who operates 10 trucks out of a depot in Thurrock under the KJ Steadman banner. "It's not very good down there at all at present."
Their sentiments are echoed by Loadwell and RC I3artram.
Loadwell runs 144 vehicles, and pulls them out of the port if it looks as though they're going to be cooling their wheels for a while. "If we can't get a container, we go back for it later," says a spokesman.
Ray Bartam, whose six-truck company is based at Liftleport near Ely, Cambs, says it's the unpredictability of it all that baffles him: "There are times when Felixstowe is a hive of efficiency, and they'll turn you round in halfan-hour," he says. "But on other days you'll be hanging about for hours on end, and I estimate that it's currently costing us £150 per week per vehicle."
The waiting is leading to strained relations between drivers, Bartram adds, especially if one driver feels that another is being loaded or unloaded out of turn. "It can get quite nasty, and courtesy goes out of the window," he says. Though a staunch supporter of Britain's premier container port, W Carter Haulage admits that it too has suffered difficulties. "I suspect that it's a temporary blip," says director Shaun Allen.
So what's going wrong? It seems as though Felixstowe has become, if only for the moment, a victim of its own phenomenal success. It's now the fourth biggest container port in Europe, the 15th largest in the world, and is well on the way to handling two million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) a year. "That's more than Southampton, Liverpool, Tilbury, and Thamesport put together, and we'll see a 6% volume increase in 1997", predicts operations director Douglas Barr.
One of the port's biggest problems, and one of the reasons why trucks are sometimes left standing for longer than they should be, is a mas
sive surge in lorry traffic in and out of the port between 15:00-19:00hrs, says Barr, with 52% of the containers which leave the port by road doing so during that period: "We're talking about 2,000 trailers in four hours, and that congestion has to be controlled to avoid accidents," he adds.
The problem is that customers want boxes collected during the afternoon for an 08:00hrs delivery, and won't take no for an answer. Discussions have been held with the Road Haulage Association to find ways of ironing out this peak, but to little avail so far.
Bad weather shut the port six times during November. "Not all of those closures affected the land side directly," says Barr, "but the knock-on effect can be significant Very high winds can stop the cranes working, and twice during November we experienced wind speeds in excess of 50 knots. With that sort of wind speed, containers start to move.
Refuting criticisms that Felixstowe hasn't invested enough on handling equipment, Barr points out that £45m was recently spent on two new quays, three new quay cranes, and three new RTGs (rubber tyred gantries). "Five new RTGs are due for delivery next March at a cost of £5m," he adds.
Monsters
The port now boasts more than 20 quay cranes, 12 of which are capable of spanning "post-Panamax" container vessels—so-called because they're too wide to go through the Panama canal, which means they're more than 106ft wide. These monsters of the oceans can carry more than 6,000 TECs and weigh up to 80,000 tonnes.
Both Barr and the Transport & General Workers Union insist that there are no labour disputes in the port "and average vehicle turnaround times are 31 minutes per container", says Barr.
Average figures never tell the entire story, of course. "At Felixstowe's Trinity terminal the average turnaround time is 27 minutes, but this figure includes the 10-minute turnaround times that can be achieved at 0300hrs, when it's quiet," says Cohn Halliday, terminal manager for P&O Containers. "It's slower between 14:00-20:00hrs." Halliday is impressed by the investment that's been put in: "As a shipping line we have a great deal of respect for this port," he says.
Some hauliers have claimed that there is undermanning, and Halliday notes that there has been a major recruitment drive: "It takes a while for people to be trained in container handling, though, so we won't feel the impact until the first or second quarter of 1997."
Hauliers also complain that the port periodically ceases loading/unloading their vehicles to concentrate on loading/unloading vessels. But that happens at all UK container ports, says Harry King, UK transport manager at Bell Lines. While it might be regrettable, it's unavoidable because the shipping line is the port's customer, he points out Aside from the fact that the captain may need to catch the tide, King points to the simple fact that holding up a container vessel costs more than delaying a 38-tonner.
Bell Lines is a short sea crossing container specialist with its own terminals at Bristol, Teesport, Tilbury, Greenock, and Waterford. Its ships carry from 230 to 549 TEUs. "Very approximately, it costs .0,000 a day to charter a 262TEU vessel, and that's only a coaster when compared with the big post-Panamax ships," King observes However, Wont Prank, managing director of Geest North Sea Line, another short sea container shipper, believes that companies like his own must get a greater grip on land transport costs if they're to provide clients with a more cost-effective service.
Ships account for some 10% of Geest's expenditure, says Pronk, but land transport accounts for 60%. "Examining how we can make our land-side operations more efficient is an on-going priority," he says, "because it is here that we can gain an edge on our competitors."
One route to improved efficiency is increased computerisation, and Felixstowe has made great strides in this area over the past decade. FCPS (Felixstowe Cargo Processing System) was introduced in 1984; it has helped cut clearance times from three or four days to one or two hours. It is managed by Maritime Cargo Processing (MCP) and allows freight forwarders to interface directly with JIM Customs by way of the Customs I kindling of Import and Export Freight system (CHIEF). Customs entries can be made using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which speeds up the whole process and elimi
nates error-prone paperwork.
"Over the past 10 years FCPS has enabled paper documentation to be abolished in at least 16 areas and has led to major time and financial savings in the port community," says an MCP spokesman. "It has involved the creation of a central database of information regarding each vessel/voyage and each item of import and export cargo. Manifest information forms the basis of the inventory and is sent to FCPS by the shipping line/agent, usually electronically: Everything from vessel discharge to Customs clearance, port health formalities and deliveries out of the depot are all assisted by facilities on FCPS."
FCPS is now in place at 13 sites, including inland clearance depots and an airport as well as sea ports, and is now being introduced at the port of Liverpool. It is used by more than 400 port and terminal operators, shipping lines, shipping and forwarding agents, and hauliers, as well as Customs and other government agencies. Its launch at Liverpool will add another 50 companies to the list.
Efficiency
While Felixstowe dominates UK container traffic, other ports are determined to take business from it wherever they can. FCPS should improve Liverpool's efficiency, while Southampton is completing a 40% extension to its container terminal. Deepening its main channel from 10.2in to 12.6m will allow a fully-laden 6,000-TEU vessel access 18 hours a day, and sometimes round-the-clock, depending on the tide.
Anticipating long-term growth in the container trade, Associated British Ports, the Southampton port authority, is hoping to bring 750 acres of reclaimed land into operational use.
At the Isle of Grain Thamesport is spending £15m on increasing its quay and storage space, extending its jetty by 100m to 650m. "We've spent a lot on automation, to the point that we're using unmanned cranes to load vehicles," says a Thamesport spokesman.
By encouraging investment this sort of competition could finally shorten the queues of trucks at container ports..
by Steve Banner
Airfreight: Is it any better?
• Trucks can sit around for hours on end at Heathrow Airport waiting to collect airfreight for onward delivery by road, says Donald Roy, European transport planner at Plane Trucking. It all depends on the volume of cargo Rowing into the airport, how many Customs hold-ups there are, and how rapidly the handling agents move, he observes: "Sometimes you'll get your cargo in two hours but sometimes it can take half a day—it varies enormously." Part of the Netherlands-based Rutges transport group, Plane Trucking also has airport depots at Birmingham. Manchester, and Glasgow. Congestion within Heathrow's boundaries has prompted Cargo Service Center (CSC) to open a £35m off-airport warehouse which has Customs approval to operate as a full transit shed. Customs usually ordains that all freight coming into Heathrow should be taken to an on-airport shed, but CSC has been able to operate off-airport partly thanks to its computer system. The system supplies Customs Freight Intelligence Department with electronic pre-arrival information on all import consignments, which helps the authorities carry out anti-smuggling checks. Peter Cross, CSC's regional director, Europe and Africa, believes that much of the airfreight industry is lagging way behind when it comes to moving to paperless systems. "It's still stuck in the 'sixties," he contends. "It's run by people with an outdated mentality who are afraid of change."