limped back to life Thursday, with cargo being unloaded at the lone
usable pier and hope that by the weekend relief supplies arriving by
sea will help take the pressure off the city’s clogged airport.
Although only a single truck at a time could
navigate the pier, the reopening of the port was a prelude to what
authorities expect will be a much larger marine operation starting
Friday. That’s when shipping operator
That could mark a long-awaited turning point when ships can regularly bring cargo to
As military officials officially declared the port open Thursday,
“We haven’t shipped anything over there” yet, said
Pino, operations manager for Antillean Marine. “Right now, I’m looking
at eight 50-foot trailers of
At the Aeropost freight company in
workers have cleared out an entire warehouse to store the Haitian
relief supplies and private cargo that has been stacking up since the
quake.
“I still have 37 pallets of water that isn’t going anywhere in a while,” said General Manager
The port repairs were one front in a widening campaign to resuscitate
Varreaux, a private port that is critical to
Currently a jetty is underwater and a boom from a crane is blocking access to Varreaux, said
The fuel terminal next to Varreaux supplies more than 70 percent of
fuel and heating oil. The 18 storage tanks at the site, also owned by
the Mevs family, are now drawn down to about a week’s supply of liquid
fuel — and opening Varreaux to tankers to resupply them is crucial,
Mevs said.
“We need fuel. Otherwise we’ll have panic,” she
said. “We are confident that there will be no interruption of supply
and we’ll meet the necessary timeframe.”
WIN has hired
A barge with pipes needed to repair the pipeline is
expected Saturday, Mevs said, and the repairs should be finished by
late next week. By then, she said, the channel leading to Varreaux
should be cleared enough to allow tankers to tie up before the depot
runs dry.
About two miles south of Varreaux, at the city’s
main port, a Crowley executive said a barge or “lighterage” operation
will begin Friday. That involves unloading 12 cargo containers from the
merchant ship Marcajama, which sailed from
The shipping containers are filled with about 300
tons of ready-to-eat meals, blankets, tents and other relief supplies,
a spokesman said. Crowley is running the lighterage operation under a
contract with the U.S. Transportation Command, a military outfit.
The earthquake left the city’s main port barely
functioning: It toppled two cranes — leaving them listing in the water
— and left the port’s primary pier unusable. The quake also turned the
main road to the port into a sea of buckled concrete.
Although some ships made limited deliveries earlier this week, a
task force specializing in port repairs arrived from Port Canaveral,
Fla., Wednesday, bringing a 40-ton crane and a lift for cargo
containers.
“We hit the ground running,” said Army Lt. Col.
The port will remain closed to commercial traffic so
that relief supplies can have priority. Riddle, the port task force
commander, said private shipments will continue arriving by road from
the
On Thursday,
A special land corridor will allow trucks with
commercial shipments for Haitian businesses to drive from the Dominican
directly to
“Nothing will be opened at the borders,” he said. They will go straight through to the terminals.”
—
(c) 2010, The Miami Herald.
Visit
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
