THE Chittagong Port Authority has enlisted the help of the Bangladesh army to speed up the construction of the Patenga Container Terminal (PCT) that is scheduled for completion by mid-2019 at a cost of US$234.1 million, in an effort to ease severe congestion in the harbour.
The engineering core of the Armed Forces Division (AFD) will assist in the development of a 600-metre long, 26-acre terminal with a depth of 9.5 metres, three jetties, and an annual capacity of 600,000 TEU.
"We are engaging the army in quick construction of the terminal. We need capacity to rise immediately," Chittagong Port Authority chairman Rear Admiral M Khaled Iqbal said, according to IHS Media.
PCT will also have rail lines to ferry containers to and from the terminal, which will be alongside a "Dolphin" jetty of 200 metres for fuel oil shipments. Two of the jetties will have four ship-to-shore gantry cranes for container handling, while the last jetty will be multipurpose and handle container and bulk shipments, according to Mr Iqbal.
Relief cannot come soon enough for Chittagong shippers, who have been overwhelmed after a June accident took out half of the port's ship-to-shore gantry crane capacity and severely worsened already bad congestion.
Container throughput at Chittagong, which handles 92 per cent of Bangladesh's seaborne trade, increased 16 per cent year over year in 2016 to 2.3 million TEU, nearly double its designed capacity of 1.6 million TEU.
