WASHINGTON: The efficiency of container movements at the Port of Charleston is among the nation’s best, according to a new report and statistics that measure how quickly cargo is loaded onto and off of ships. The Wando Welch Terminal in Mount Pleasant had the nation’s second-fastest efficiency growth rate last year, according to a study outlined in Monday’s edition of The Journal of Commerce, a trade publication.
That study looks at berth production, which is the number of containers moved during the entire time a ship is tied to a terminal’s dock. Efficiency at Wando Welch — the SPA’s largest container terminal — grew at a weighted rate of 9 percent year-over-year, second to the 10 percent growth rate at Conley Container Terminal in Boston.
While berth production is a key metric for how well a port operates, it can be skewed if a ship sits at the dock for several hours when no loading or unloading is taking place. Another measure of productivity is the average number of cargo containers loaded or unloaded — called crane moves — during each hour that such work is being performed.
The SPA also gets high marks in that category, with an average of 40.9 crane moves per hour at all of its container terminals. That is at the top of the range for U.S. ports, where 30 to 35 crane moves per hour is considered above average, according to the Journal of Commerce. “Our crane moves per hour, or port productivity, reflects the number of boxes handled from the moment the first box is released until the last box,” SPA spokeswoman Erin Dhand said. “We believe this is the truest measure of the product we offer our customers.”
The maritime agency hopes to boost efficiency further by investing nearly $63 million on wharf improvements at the 267-acre Wando Welch facility, located on the east bank of the Wando River. The SPA also is upgrading the terminal’s capacity for refrigerated cargo and is spending $30 million on two new cranes that will be able to handle fully-loaded ships carrying up to 14,000 20-foot-long cargo boxes. Most of the improvements will be funded by about $294 million in bond debt issued last year.
The wharf project and new cranes, which will be delivered this summer, “are an integral part of SPA’s strategy to remain competitive in today’s big-ship environment,” Dhand said. The improvements will help the SPA better handle the big ships that are expected to visit Charleston once the Panama Canal expansion is completed this month and the Bayonne Bridge in New Jersey is raised in 2017.
The Journal of Commerce’s data cover 130 million container moves at 750 container terminals worldwide. The data showed berth productivity was down at most of the world’s ports, with an average 7 percent decline in Latin America, the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Productivity declined moderately in East Asia, but there were some improvements in Africa and Southeast Asia, the Journal of Commerce reported.
“Lines and terminals have yet to realize the virtues and benefits of greater efficiency and, if left unchecked, this will continue to have detrimental impacts on the supply chain generally,” Andy Lane, partner with Singapore-based CTI Consultancy, told the transportation publication. The Oman International Container Terminal in Sohar, Oman, had the world’s fastest growth in berth productivity at 101 percent.
