The Senari port operations suffered a computer system outage due to water damage.
KUCHING (April 28): The Sarawak Shipping Association (SSA) views the Kuching Port Authority (KPA) Container Operation Unit’s (COU) recent computer system malfunction as the tip of an iceberg that triggered the shipping lines to resort to imposing the congestion surcharge.
“The collection of such surcharge was seen more on alerting the Port to reexamine its performance level, rather than recovering ship owners’ daily losses due to unnecessarily queueing up more than one week for berth under the present situation,” it said in a statement.
It said that based on the international shipping exchange Baltic Shipping Index (BSI), the daily hire rate for 1,000 twenty-foot equivalent unit (TEU) capacity ships was currently around USD15,000 (RM6,1537.50) per day.
SSA pointed out that it and the shipping lines had been urging KPA over the past several years to procure more reliable handling equipment including quay cranes (QC) to replace the existing old and frequently breaking-down machines.
It explained that the COU consists of two wings, one the quayside ship loading and discharging operation including container stacking at container yard (CY), while the other wing is tasked with the containers delivery and re-delivery at the yard for hauliers.
“The port should have allocated a separate set of men and equipment to handle the two wings independently, but due to frequent malfunctioning of the handling equipment that necessitated merging of the two wings’ operations at CY, thus came the situation of mistreatment of one wing in order to satisfy the other.
“It is high time for top management at ministerial level to revamp the whole operations and allocate contingency fund to beef up machinery to diffuse the current crisis,” it said.
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KPA’s Senari Port computer system was damaged on March 27 after water seeped into its electrical conduit, causing congestion at the port which led to the surcharge that could then trickle down to consumers.
On Monday, the shipping companies agreed to cease imposing the surcharge after a meeting with Infrastructure and Ports Development Minister Tan Sri Datuk Amar Dr James Masing.
Masing, who is a deputy chief minister, assured the shipping companies in a statement yesterday that by the end of the month, KPA’s operation would return to normal and the congestion will be solved.
He said the computer malfunction had resulted in the congestion of containers being processed by KPA, from a normal time of 40 minutes to at least two hours per container.
To ensure that the problem will not recur, he said KPA would also acquire a new harbour crane using KPA’s own internal funding on top of KPA rectifying the computer system outage, and shipping companies to provide their own ship-to-shores cranes on one berth.
He added that as a long-term measure, the state government would acquire two extra quay cranes to enable three berth operations, as well as four new gantry cranes to replace the current aging cranes.
Masing also said KPA had been instructed to review its computer system, with backup software, so that in the event of another computer outage, there would not be any more congestion both on land and on sea.