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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Panama Canal challenges for PoS Port

by

20160525

The Port of Port-of-Spain does not have the lev­el of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty to ac­com­mo­date busi­ness from the ex­pand­ed Pana­ma Canal which is due to be in­au­gu­rat­ed on June 26. Act­ing gen­er­al man­ag­er of the Port Au­thor­i­ty Char­maine Lewis, who ad­mit­ted this yes­ter­day, said se­ri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion is be­ing giv­en to part­ner­ing with a for­eign in­vestor to ad­dress is­sues fac­ing the port.

"We feel they would bring their knowl­edge, their ex­per­tise, their sys­tems and their mar­ket, be­cause we are look­ing at the big play­ers. We feel there is an op­por­tu­ni­ty to part­ner and we can lever­age from their po­si­tion in the mar­ket," she said when she spoke at the con­fer­ence, Pan­chay­at on the Pana­ma Canal: Busi­ness Op­por­tu­ni­ties and Chal­lenges for T&T, at the Arthur Lok jack Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness, Mt Hope yes­ter­day.

Lewis said among the chal­lenges fac­ing the port is its high over­time bill. She said the Port Au­thor­i­ty is work­ing with the rep­re­sen­ta­tive union to im­ple­ment new work prac­tices.

In terms of land and nau­ti­cal mat­ters, Lewis said the port is un­able to ac­com­mo­date larg­er ves­sels.

"We can ac­com­mo­date a ves­sel with length of ap­prox­i­mate­ly 295 me­tres at this time. We don't have the cor­rect depth at this time for the drafts of 15 me­tres," she said.

"The har­bor should at least be a depth of 12.5 me­tres to ac­com­mo­date the large ves­sels. For those ves­sels with a draft of 15.2 me­tres your har­bor should be at least 17 me­tres.

"One has to be able to sat­is­fy in­dus­try stan­dards in terms of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and cus­tomer ser­vice. The ship­ping lines are in­ter­est­ed in your pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, how fast you can turn your ships around."

Lewis said there are stan­dards the port has to achieve if it is "seek­ing to be in the game" to get the con­tain­er busi­ness.

The Pana­ma Canal ex­pan­sion project, dou­bles the ca­pac­i­ty of that wa­ter­way by in­creas­ing the num­ber of ships, adding a new lane of traf­fic, and in­creas­ing the size of ships by in­creas­ing the max­i­mum al­lowed width and height. The new larg­er size of ships, called New Pana­max, is about one and a half times the cur­rent Pana­max size and can car­ry over twice as much car­go.


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