Port of Virginia sets container volume record in June

The mid-Atlantic port, which will be frequented by 10,300-TEU vessels starting at the end of this month, handled 216,672 TEUs in June, a year-over-year increase of 1.5 percent.    The Port of Virginia ended its fiscal year on a high note, with record volumes for the month of June at 216,672 TEUs, a 1.5 percent increase from June 2015.
   For the fiscal year, container volumes grew 2.5 percent year-over-year to 2.57 million TEUs, the port authority said Tuesday.
   Meanwhile, container throughput for the first half of 2016 rose 1.9 percent.
   Growth is down considerably from the go-go years of 2014-2015 as global trade has slowed and West Coast ports have clawed back much of the cargo that was diverted a year ago to avoid port slowdowns related to congestion and a dockworker labor dispute. East Coast ports overall have seen their container business flatten this year.
   John Reinhart, executive director of the Virginia Port Authority, predicted modest traffic gains for the upcoming peak season.
   Other highlights from the fiscal year included a 9.7 percent increase in rail car moves to 511,096 and a 15.8 percent increase (16,347)  in barge traffic to the inland Port of Richmond. In June, however, barge traffic between Hampton Roads and Richmond plummeted 22 percent from last June, while overall barge traffic was off by 30.3 percent from June 2015.
   The primary factor was the realignment of vessel services that has shifted some of Virginia’s normal barge cargo onto a direct vessel call to Baltimore, spokesman Joe Harris said in an e-mail.
   Reinhart said the port will begin to see a new, larger class of vessels calling The Port of Virginia that will arrive as the result of the opening of the Panama Canal’s new locks. On Monday, the port hosted the10,000-TEU MOL Benefactor, which is the largest vessel to date to call Virginia. The containership eclipses the previous capacity record set in Virginia by 500 TEUs, however, the mark set by the Benefactor will, however, be short lived.
   “Starting at the end of this month, we will see a series of five vessel calls, each with 10,300-TEU capacity, come to Virginia,” Reinhart said. “During the next 12-18 months, the ships calling here will get progressively bigger – the 12,000-TEU range – and there will be larger cargo volumes associated with those vessels. There will be another jump in size after that, so we are preparing accordingly and are discussing those plans out in the market.”
   In order to prepare for these vessels, the port is in the process of expanding its cargo handling capacity. The first largescale capacity project will be to rebuild the upland operation at the South Berth of Norfolk International Terminals (NIT). Reinhart said the $350 million project will increase annual throughput capacity at NIT by 46 percent, or 400,000 containers by 2019.