Operators fume over more Elbe deepening delays
According to a leading German feeder shipping company, new delays in plans to deepen Hamburg’ s Elbe River to 14.5 m to allow access for ever bigger boxships are dangerous and have already cost Germany’ s biggest seaport its position as Europe’ s Number 1 transshipment hub.
Unifeeder MD Bernd Bertram told a symposium in Hamburg that in the first half of 2009 alone, about 1.4m feeder and overseas TEUs had been lost to the port. Declaring that further delays were ‘dangerous’, he said rival ports like Rotterdam and Antwerp were the first to benefit.
He added that not only the ongoing economic downturn was responsible for the losses but that ‘many home grown mistakes’ had also contributed to the situation, one of them being delays over Elbe deepening.
Bertram’s comments came as officials, port operators and shipowners fumed at news that Government planning approval for deepening had been delayed yet again. The port operators’ body UHH said the delay was incomprehensible. Deepening was ‘far and away the most important infrastructure project for the future of the Port of Hamburg’, it added. The head of main port operator HHLA, Klaus-Dieter Peters, said ‘the process is taking far too long’.
Supporters have long urged Elbe deepening to permit mega-ships of 10,000 TEUs and more to reach Hamburg fully laden and independent of tide. They say that shipowners could bypass the port in future and that billions of Euros now being spent in terminal expansion projects would be wasted.
The deepening project was first put to the Government seven years ago. Latest word is that approval will not now come until as late as autumn 2010, meaning it could be 2011 before work on the €380m project begins. Originally, it was planned to start dredging in 2008 and finish it by next year.
By Tom Todd
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