Not-so-fair wind

When a senior shipping line executive totalled the number of operational days lost to weather-related shutdowns at Shanghai last year, I’ll admit I was genuinely shocked at the figure he gave.

ONE’s chief executive Jeremy Nixon counted that Shanghai was shut for 25 days between April and August 2018, with eight days of those days in August alone. The world’s largest port closed for 7% of the year because of a jump in the amount and severity of typhoons and cyclones in Asia. Think on that.

Mr Nixon warned that this is “a real disruption and a real reality” for ports and terminals in the region and he’s not wrong.

In conversation with another Asian terminal operator, I learnt of the knock-on effects of these closures in 2018 and heard anecdotally how berth planning “went out of the window” when they tried to accommodate the ships locked out of Shanghai.

On the upside, the operator confided that informal intra-port berth sharing came into play to facilitate diverted calls as best as possible. However, he conceded that this was a short-term fix and not a long-term solution – this particular port simply doesn’t have the spare capacity necessary to cater for ultra large container ships if weather closures force them to abruptly turn away from their final destination.

Of course, weather-related issues for shipping are as old as the industry itself. But putting a hard number on complete port shutdowns puts the scale of the problem into perspective.

Panama too is suffering from unusual weather-related challenges, with much drier than average rainfall in December forcing the Canal Authority to reduce the maximum allowable draft for ships that use the wider neopanamax locks. While ships with a maximum draft of 50 feet should be able to travel through them, the restriction in early May was for a maximum draft of 45 feet. This means that the larger containerships can’t carry as much freight through – bad for them and bad for Panama’s coffers as tolls are calculated on freight. 

In the US, Long Beach is expected to publish its Climate Action and Assessment Report in the second half of the year and if Los Angeles’s already-completed report is anything to go by Long Beach’s won’t make pleasant reading. When LA published its report some years back it found that three of its 10 shipping piers could be inundated with water even in the mildest sea-level rise projections.

Inclement weather is causing problems, no doubt about it. And with confirmation that the El Ni?o natural climate pattern has arrived this year, ports should prepare for further disruptions. ONE’s Mr Nixon confirmed that his line now schedules services differently to overcome closures. Second tier ports may find they come into their own offering weather contingency planning services if they proactively approach lines now.