History repeats itself. With Lisbon and Setúbal on strike, Leixões bursts through the seams in the handling of containers. In October, Yilport grew there 20.6%. In October, the Yilport Leixões (as now called the TCL) handled 64 136 TEUs. A year ago, in the same month, 53,200 were counted.
With this exceptional result, the movement accumulated in the first ten months of the year jumped to 539,801 TEU, 3.9% higher than the one carried out between January and October 2017, the concessionaire's director general told TRANSPORTES & BUSINESSES. The increase in activity in Leixões is justified to a great extent by the dragging of labor conflicts in the ports of Lisbon and Setúbal. A situation that ends up creating problems of responsiveness in the northern port, where space is something that has not long abounded. "We are working together with APDL to try to reorganize other cargoes in Porto so that we can be allocated new areas where containers can be stored immediately," says Nuno David. "The terminal and the available space are being optimized to the maximum, thanks to excellent planning work and human and financial effort, to respond positively to the increase in demand," he adds.
In order to free up space (and minimize the impact of the reduction of days of free deposit of containers), the terminal "has operationalized the concierge every Saturday and public holidays to allow the lifting of cargo." But, "regrettably, this effort is not being accompanied by the recipients and transporters, who have not taken advantage of our operational flexibility", exemplifies, critically, the person in charge of Yilport Leixões. As if the increase in volumes is not enough, there are more and more frequent ship scales on which 3,000 TEUs and more are loaded / unloaded. "Increased movement by scale puts more pressure on the terminal, both in front of quayside and in the park. The biggest difficulty, however, is in the park, since it is not easy to operate ships that at one time discharged in terminal more than 1 000 containers ".
To mitigate the situation, more and more days are the days when the container terminal of Leixões works 24 × 7, "and we now have several occasions when we operate more than one ship simultaneously at night," says Nuno David. Forecasts for the end of the year, the general director of Yilport Leixões prefers not to do so, since "everything will depend on the strike to the extraordinary work decreed by the SEAL to maintain, or not." If the strike continues, Leixões "will once again exceed 650,000 TEU," he anticipates. Last year there were 633 thousand. The best result ever was registered in 2014, with 666 thousand TEU, then also with the "help" of Lisbon.
