The R5.4bn, five-year expansion programme at the Cape Town container terminal continues to transform South Africa’s second largest container facility
p>The R5.4bn, five-year expansion programme at the Cape Town container terminal continues to transform South Africa’s second largest container facility
Cape Town is gaining a modern facility that will be capable of handling nearly double its existing cargo capacity by 2012.
Major dredging, deepening and refurbishment work on the second of four berths is well underway and was completed in May 2011. The first 100m of Berth 602 has been handed over recently to terminal operations. Coupled with the refurbished Berth 601, this affords the terminal 420m of berth space to accommodate one large 305m vessel along its long quay.
Says Transnet Port Terminal’s (TPT) Western Province Terminal Executive, Velile Dube, “There have been some challenges. Most significant of these is the complexity of maintaining uninterrupted operations at the container terminal while it is effectively a construction site.
Inside the terminal, the fleet of harbour cranes has been beefed up to improve the efficiency of container handling. The fifth and sixth Liebherr ship-to-shore cranes were commissioned and worked on their first vessel in August 2010. These cranes were slipped into position on Berth 601 by specialised trailers. With a total of six new Liebherr cranes in place, Berth 601 offers high productivity container handling that is faster and more efficient.
The fleet of straddle carriers in Cape Town is also being phased out in favour of massive rubber-tyred gantry (RTG) cranes, which make better use of limited space by stacking six rows wide, five containers high and 30 deep. To date 28 RTG cranes have been commissioned and handed over to the terminal. Four more RTGs and some of the straddle carriers are being transferred to Durban’s container terminals.
Refrigerated containers, or reefers, benefited from the handing over, late in August, of 864 reefer plug points in reefer block 1. The overall expansion programme will result in three reefer stacks with a total of 2,712 reefer points served by gantry cranes.
Human capital development has also been a major aspect of the expansion programme. The terminal’s new cranes necessitated an aggressive training programme for operators of lifting equipment (OLEs), with 33OLEs joining operations in August 2010 and bringing the total number of newly trained OLEs to 120. Additional training in operation of ship-to-shore cranes commenced in January 2011.
Dube said the five year expansion project is one of several Transnet projects taking place within South Africa’s container sector, with the aim of creating additional capacity ahead of demand. By 2012, the capacity of the terminal will be 1.4mn TEUs, nearly double its existing 740,000 TEU capability.
