Severe storms disrupted container movement at the Port of Cape Town last week when wind speeds of up to 110 kilometres an hour forced ship-to-shore (STS) cranes to shut down automatically.
According to Freight News contributor Clifford Evans, one of the STS units recorded wind speed of about 60 knots at the port yesterday morning.
It brought container movement to a halt as the hoisting and parallel movement of containers is too dangerous in high-speed winds.
Apart from STS cranes shutting down, swell surges added to the inclement conditions at the port. Despite the loss of throughput at the container terminal, the port had not closed down as had been reported by some sources, logistics utility Transnet said.
Sunday’s extreme weather marked a peak period of violent squalls that devastated large parts of the Cape, ripping through informal settlements, dangerously dispersing corrugated iron sheets through the air and fanning fires, one of which laid waste the historic 300-year-old Blaauklippen manor house in Stellenbosch.
Cape Town International Airport suspended flights because of the adverse conditions. It brought to a head weather conditions that started on Friday when a swell surge resulted in an inbound cruise liner at the port, the Ambience, with 1 400 passengers on board, colliding with a cargo vessel, the Grey Fox.
Transnet National Ports Authority has said that marine services at the port are currently operational. Although the provincial government braced itself for more extreme weather on Monday, April 8, Evans said the storm seemed to be subsiding.
“It looks like the worst of it has passed. It’s some of the fiercest wind we have experienced in recent times,” Evans said.
