Port News

FedEx was forced to turn away freight because of slowdowns at West Coast ports, a reminder of how port congestion is hurting the bottom lines of not just shippers but also the inland transportation providers they depend on.

A U.S. District Court in Oregon ruled that the International Longshore and Warehouse in 2012-13 engaged in unlawful work slowdowns and stoppages at Terminal 6 at the Port of Portland.

Terminal congestion and alleged job actions by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union pulled down Los Angeles-Long Beach container volume by 1 percent on a year-over-year basis in November, according to statistics released by the ports.

Container volume through the Port of Charleston last month rose 8 percent from November 2013 as the South Carolina Port Authority recorded across-the-board increases in cargo volume.

Negotiators for the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association will resume direct negotiations on Thursday, even as they disagree over the current state of the contract talks.

Container volume handled by the Alabama State Port Authority rose 10 percent year-over-year in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, helping the authority post record revenue for its fiscal year ended Sept. 30.

DP World’s Indian facility, Mundra International Container Terminal, said it broke the one-million-TEU mark for the first time in its fiscal year that ends Dec. 30.

APM Terminals said one its nw Rotterdam terminals will be the first in the world to have a zero-emission footprint, thanks to a two-year contract to buy wind-generated electricity.

The largest container ship handled by an Indian port was the 14,000 TEU capacity vessel MSC Valeria at Mundra in 2013, a record that has little chance of being broken any time soon.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union today recessed the caucus that it opened on Monday as the union awaited a response from the Pacific Maritime Association on its latest contract proposal.

Container terminals in the Port of New York and New Jersey will close on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day but will be open for regular hours on Friday, Dec. 26.

The installation of new gates at a Panama Canal expansion site will bring the project to 84 percent of completion ahead of an estimated early 2016 opening date, the canal authority says.

Indonesia’s marine-highway program — a bold $55.4 billion plan to develop 24 commercial seaports, over a thousand non-commercial seaports and procure vessels — is facing a revision as some ports in the proposal may not be suitable for handling containers.

U.S. intermodal trains on average are moving faster, but they still have a ways to go before delivering the level of service shippers had come to expect before last winter.

Malaysia’s port of Tanjung Pelepas (PTP) passed the 8 million 20-foot container mark at the beginning of December, although with less than a month left and volumes slowing down, the 2014 throughput target of 9 million TEUs looks well out of reach.

Cosco Pacific, the port operating arm of China’s largest shipping company, has growth its throughput by 10 percent from January through November this year, a reflection of strong export volumes that kept its terminals busy during the second half.

In a give-and-take effort that may push contract negotiations forward, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union is waiting for the Pacific Maritime Association to respond to its comments on the latest offer from U.S. West Coast employers.

A surge in import traffic has led the Port of Houston Authority to extend its container terminal operating hours.

Brazil port and health authorities carried out a simulated ebola emergency at the port of Santos last week to help improve the response to the threat the disease poses at maritime ports of entry.

Relocation of manufacturing to the U.S. has increased in recent years but doesn’t appear to be growing faster than manufactured imports, management consulting firm A.T. Kearney says in a report on reshoring.

Sixty-six percent of U.S. shippers surveyed by JOC.com say they plan to ship less cargo through the U.S. West Coast next year because of ongoing congestion and delays, suggesting that ports from Long Beach to Seattle could lose market share just as they did after a 10-day work stoppage in 2002.

This week's International Longshore and Warehouse Union caucus in San Francisco may or may not be the end to seven months of contract negotiation that has engulfed the West Coast in disruption and uncertainty.

International Longshoremen’s Association President Harold Daggett said the ILA won’t change its contract bargaining process, except possibly to try to reverse the order in which coastwide and local agreements are negotiated.

A second arbitrator has ruled that the no-strike clause in the coastwide master contract the International Longshoremen’s Association ratified last year applies even in ports where bargaining on supplementary local contracts remains incomplete.

New data from a laboratory study shows Port of Oakland is nearing its goal of reducing emissions at the port by 85 percent by 2020.

Delays in receiving holiday sale inventory will likely affect fourth-quarter results of some shippers as they incur the added costs of diverting cargo and lost sales.

The International Longshoremen’s Association agreed to unload military cargo from a ship returning to Beaumont, Texas, from Ebola-stricken Liberia after federal officials certified that the vessel posed no health risk.

For the sixth week in a row, JOC.com’s top stories center around continuing congestion at U.S. West Coast ports. But while eight of the top 10 stories centered on labor strife and delays, two other stories garnered attention: the massive, $1.1 trillion cromnibus spending bill in the U.S., and the factory shift from China to Vietnam.

Throughput at Port Everglades jumped 12.5 percent in October, newly released port statistics show.

Shippers and ocean carriers, left reeling from months-long congestion and berthing delays at India’s largest container port complex, Nhava Sheva (Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust), are unlikely to get a break in the near future, as the port authority has been forced to push back an equipment modernization program by a month following delays in the arrival of new gantry cranes.

It's been called the final frontier for trade growth — the only place in the world where exponential economic and cargo growth is still possible and major trade is still evolving. Rising African container volumes are increasingly showing the limits of freight infrastructure on both the East and West African coasts, where ports are experiencing trouble dealing with the rise in ship calls and freight volume.

The port of Antwerp faces a total shutdown on Monday as dockers and other waterfront workers join a 24-hour nationwide strike that will also paralyze rail freight and air cargo traffic across Belgium.

The container throughput counter at Ningbo-Zhoushan port clicked over to 20 million TEUs at midnight last night, effectively sealing its place as the world’s fifth busiest container port and relegating Korea’s transshipment hub Busan to sixth place.

One of the effects of larger vessels being deployed is that transshipment hubs will see fewer vessels making calls, but they will stay for longer and generate more container volume, a trend that is becoming more evident in Hong Kong.

The ongoing congestion plaguing U.S. West Coast ports is forcing shippers to re-examine their supply chains with an eye to building in more safeguards against shortfalls in product imports.

Aqaba Container Terminal, Jordan’s only container port, apologized for delays caused by a worker strike last week, which left nearly 10 days worth of container traffic stranded.

A massive federal spending bill is poised to get U.S. port funding closer to a set schedule over the next decade but will still come short of the target.

EUROGATE Container Terminal Bremerhaven this week handled its 1 millionth standard rail container, as more intermodal trains served the German gateway this year than in 2013.