Several giant container ships, full of goods for Christmas, had to be redirected from Felixstowe (east of England) to European ports because of traffic jams in its terminals, caused by the pandemic and Brexit.
Read also Covid, Brexit: the United Kingdom in the trap of shortages
"In order to ensure that goods will be widely available in the UK for Black Friday and Christmas, we have started to reroute one of our three large ships calling at Felixstowe every week
,
"
a door told AFP on Tuesday. - talk from Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company. These large freighters then dock in other ports on the continent, such as Rotterdam or Antwerp, and then the goods are transferred to
"smaller ships which bring them back to Felixstowe"
, where there is room for smaller boats.
“We had to stop operations on a ship because there was nowhere to unload the containers,”
said Maersk east-west maritime network manager Lars Mikael Jensen.
Rerouting it to a European port,
"it's better than having a ship waiting outside Felixstowe for four, five or six days to get a berth,"
he added.
Shortage of truck drivers
According to the spokesperson for the group,
"port congestion has become widespread around the world since the disruption created by the pandemic on global supply chains"
, but
"Felixstowe is among the 3-4 most affected ports. in the world ”,
while the port handles 36% of UK sea freight volume per container. In question ? The
"empty containers that are not being picked up at normal speed, because of the shortage of truck drivers",
brought about by Brexit and the pandemic. For weeks, the shortage of around 100,000 lorry drivers in the UK has resulted in serious delivery problems to UK supermarkets and service stations running out of gas.
Faced with the threat of empty shelves at Christmas, the government amended its immigration policy to grant up to 10,500 provisional work visas, including 300 for tanker drivers, but less than 10% of them had found takers in early October.
"Like other major ports in the UK and elsewhere, Felixstowe is feeling the effects of the global supply chain crisis
,
"
acknowledged a spokesperson for the port.
If
"the level of empty containers remains high"
,
"the vast majority of containers on arrival are treated a few minutes after their arrival"
, he said however, indicating that
"the situation is improving"
.
