SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

shar­lene.ram­per­sad@guardian.co.tt

Op­er­a­tions at the Port of Port-of-Spain are ex­pect­ed to be­come more ef­fi­cient in just un­der two months, when a brand new Ship To Shore (STS) crane is put in­to op­er­a­tion.

The crane was man­u­fac­tured by Irish com­pa­ny Lieb­herr and cost TT$70mil­lion.

It was de­liv­ered to Trinidad in ear­ly March and will be put in­to ser­vice by mid-June. 

Dur­ing a tour of the port yes­ter­day, Works and Trans­port Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said this ful­ly-com­put­erised crane will sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­prove op­er­a­tions at the port.

“This crane when you com­pare it to the size of the oth­er cranes we have, you can see its a much larg­er crane, a much more mod­ern crane and it can ac­tu­al­ly help us once we start to at­tract the Pana­ma-size ves­sels, once we have the in­fra­struc­ture for that, at least we have a crane that can be utilised to as­sist us with those large con­tain­er haulers,” Sinanan said.

The new STS will re­place the Port Au­thor­i­ty’s old­est Pace­co STS crane, which is now 42 years old. 

Sinanan said that crane was about 17 years past its shelf life and it will be auc­tioned off by the Port Au­thor­i­ty. 

He said Cab­i­net ap­proval was giv­en be­tween 2015 and 2016 for the pur­chase of the new STS crane.

He said, “It can move more con­tain­ers in a short­er space of time so that will im­prove the ef­fi­cien­cy of the port. This crane does about 35 con­tain­ers an hour, the cranes we used be­fore that prob­a­bly did half of the amount.”

He said be­cause it is ful­ly com­put­erised, it will al­so be eas­i­er to main­tain. Sinanan said this type of equip­ment is the fu­ture for port op­er­a­tions.

“This crane ac­tu­al­ly po­si­tions the port for the fu­ture, this is what we have to do if we have to get the port to the in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dard that we are look­ing for,” the min­is­ter said.

He said that a Re­quest for Pro­pos­al (RFP) will be put out in the com­ing months as the Cab­i­net is set to de­cide on a pri­vate part­ner to man­age the Port’s com­mer­cial op­er­a­tions.

“This will def­i­nite­ly make it a lot more at­trac­tive and the port is an in­sti­tu­tion that has to con­tin­ue so un­til we get that part­ner that we are look­ing for, we will con­tin­ue to en­hance the port of Port of Spain to en­sure that the port con­tin­ues to move for­ward,” he said.