Moving to ease a space crunch at Charleston's crowded
shipping terminals, the State Ports Authority on Thursday decided to crack down
on customers who leave loaded containers lying around at the port.
Beginning in June, the authority will start charging its clients fees for
containers stored on port property longer than a week.
Some shipping customers have been using the terminals as a sort of warehouse,
moving goods out of their own facilities to the Port of Charleston sometimes
more than a month before they're supposed to be shipped, port officials said.
The practice is making congestion worse at the port, which is expected to
reach full capacity sometime in the next few years.
"If you think about arriving for your airplane two days early, you're kind of
in the way of people who are actually boarding," Fred Stribling, vice president
of marketing and sales for the SPA, said Thursday during a ports board meeting.
"It's a national issue, and we're right there with other ports taking it on."
The SPA won't reveal until sometime next week how much the fees will be, but
officials have hinted that the cost will be in line with what other terminal
operators are now charging.
Shipping giants including Maersk Sealand have announced to their customers in
recent weeks that the costs -- called demurrage fees -- could be as high as $345
per day for a container at some terminals. Last month, for instance, Maher
Terminal in New Jersey began charging a fee on any loaded container stored at
the facility for more than four days.SPA spokesman Byron Miller said that in a
couple of recent cases, loaded containers have been left at Charleston-area
terminals for up to five weeks before a shipment is scheduled to be moved out of
the port.
"It's an all-too-common practice," Miller said. "These companies will do
large volumes of something, and once it's produced, they want it out of their
facility. The waterfront property we have is a very valuable resource, and we're
just trying to get the highest and best use of it."
The fee will become part of contracts negotiated between shipping customers
and the SPA. Many clients already have been informed the fee is coming and have
agreed to it, Stribling said.
In other SPA developments Thursday, the ports authority hired a Long
Beach-based firm, Moffatt & Nichol, to plan how a proposed North Charleston
terminal will operate.
The SPA will pay the firm $1.4 million to help determine what kinds of
container-handling equipment will be used, how a terminal at the former
Charleston Naval Base will be structured and whether containers will be moved
around the terminal by rail or road.
The design work also will address whether some jobs now performed by union
checkers and clerks, such as verifying container numbers and tracking their
movement on the docks, will be done by machines at the new terminal. That issue
is something that will have to be decided among all waterfront parties and
shipping customers, officials said.
The SPA also will pay Mount Pleasant-based firm Newark Environmental up to
$200,000 to come up with an environmental cleanup plan for the proposed terminal
site, a requirement for the SPA to get approval to build the project from the
Army Corps of Engineers. The authority is expecting to spend millions to clean
up the former Navy Base where the terminal is to be built.
The ports board also reported that crane operator productivity has declined
over the past month, down from 39 container moves per hour to 35. Bill McClean,
SPA vice president for operations, said the slowed pace is because the
International Longshoremen's Association has recently had to hire and train
about 200 new truck drivers to move containers around the docks. He said a new
system implemented at the port terminals to track containers should help speed
up container movement.
