LONDON: The Port of Oakland has joined its Southern California peers and other U.S. ports in refusing to offer container weighing services for shippers, making it their responsibility to find other means to ensure compliance with the SOLAS container weight verification rule that takes effect on Jul. 1, 2016.
The news underscores the difficulties shippers using some of the busiest ports in the U.S. will face as they seek to comply with the new rule from the International Maritime Organization, which threatens to gridlock international supply chains.
Oakland’s announcement was made in a four-paragraph statement in which it said each individual terminal will establish and communicate its own policies for the transmission of a container’s verified gross weight.
The absence of weighing services and unique verified gross mass policies in Oakland is identical to the stance of Los Angeles and Long Beach, where the port complex’s 13 terminals will also craft their own individual policies.
Some terminals, such as Maher in the Port of New York and New Jersey, said that without transmitting VGM data via electronic data interchange, containers would not be allowed through its gates. In the Southeast, the Port of Virginia has also said it will not offer container weighing services, but Charleston said it is open to providing them.
Oakland’s decision is sure to irk agricultural exporters, some of the VGM rule’s most vociferous opponents, because the port derives a good deal of traffic from agricultural shipping. It would be a “step backward” if terminals were to offer weighing services, according to one terminal source. If a VGM is provided before a container arrives at the terminal, the terminal would not be required to reweigh the container and compare it with the VGM. If a terminal was to provide weighing services and compare this to shipper-generated VGMs, it would show a potential discrepancy more often than not.
