THE Port of new York and New Jersey is working to clear a bottleneck of containerships anchored off the coast of Long Island as Covid cases surge, reports Bloomberg News.
'We have seen a spike in the number of labour going out into quarantine,' said New York and New Jersey port authority director Sam Ruda.
The average wait at anchorage for container carriers was 4.75 days in the final week of 2021, compared with an average of 1.6 days for all of last year.
International Longshoremen's Association representative Jim McNamara declared that the number of its members unavailable to work because of Covid is running 350 a day.
Still, Mr McNamara called the impact slight because some crews are returning from quarantine or illness and others are available from cruise ship terminals.
The New York area's port terminals have avoided backlogs like those gripping the twin gateways of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
New York's port has been running at full capacity for almost two years, handling 27 per cent more volume in November 2021 than it did in November 2019.
'We've essentially had five years of cargo growth in the space of 18, 20 months or so,' said Mr Ruda.
'On an order of magnitude, it does seem quite small, but it does have our attention.'
From January through October last year, the New York-New Jersey terminals greeted 298 vessels capable of carrying 10,000 to 15,000 TEU, up from 55 four years earlier, when a US$1.7 billion project to raise the Bayonne Bridge to accommodate those bigger vessels was completed.
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'We have seen a spike in the number of labour going out into quarantine,' said New York and New Jersey port authority director Sam Ruda.
The average wait at anchorage for container carriers was 4.75 days in the final week of 2021, compared with an average of 1.6 days for all of last year.
International Longshoremen's Association representative Jim McNamara declared that the number of its members unavailable to work because of Covid is running 350 a day.
Still, Mr McNamara called the impact slight because some crews are returning from quarantine or illness and others are available from cruise ship terminals.
The New York area's port terminals have avoided backlogs like those gripping the twin gateways of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
New York's port has been running at full capacity for almost two years, handling 27 per cent more volume in November 2021 than it did in November 2019.
'We've essentially had five years of cargo growth in the space of 18, 20 months or so,' said Mr Ruda.
'On an order of magnitude, it does seem quite small, but it does have our attention.'
From January through October last year, the New York-New Jersey terminals greeted 298 vessels capable of carrying 10,000 to 15,000 TEU, up from 55 four years earlier, when a US$1.7 billion project to raise the Bayonne Bridge to accommodate those bigger vessels was completed.
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