Peak Season Causes Delays at Port of Belize

Delays at the Port of Belize Limited are not unusual for this time of the year. On Friday, truck drivers expressed complaints of a delay at the PBL. The drivers claimed that some of them were even ticketed by traffic officers for parking on Central American Boulevard. But, the drivers say they don’t have any other choice but to park in front of the port’s gate, due to the delay. PBL’s CEO, Andy Lane, told Love News that given the time of the year which is currently leading up to the Christmas season, the port has a surge of containers coming in at the port.

Andy Lane, CEO, Port of Belize Limited: “We’re presently in peak season and this happens at this time of year when you get a surge of import containers bringing in the goods for the Chrstimas sales. So we find ourselves in a situation where the port and also the warehouse are both presently fully utilized so this is also why we need to commence the building of our new port as soon as possible so that we have the space for future demand both in terms of cargo volumes and also lager vessels. It’s happened in previous years and it’s not just Friday it’s been happening for the last couple of weeks.”

Lane had stated; however, that this does happen daily at the port on a smaller scale, but there are multiple forces in play. He had pointed out that delays at Customs might have added to the difficulties the port experiences. He says that they will be working along with customs to see how they can sort out these issues.

Andy Lane, CEO, Port of Belize Limited: “So it’s not just the seasonal peak that we’re in but every single day regardless of season we have a huge peak where 60 or 70% of the trucks arrive first thing in the morning so a few weeks ago we advanced our opening time by an hour and that certainly helped. More recently what we’ve also done is we’ve extended our services into the evenings mainly for containers but also sometimes for cargo collection and what I would like to say here as well is a big thanks to Customs who’ve been extremely accommodating with being able to extend their time and to keep us operational. Now we opened on Saturday, we processed forty one trucks an average thirty seven minutes per truck turn time which by global standards is actually an excellent performance so we will continue to extend these opening periods for as long as the demand persists. In this week we’re gonna be speaking with the comptroller of customs because we believe there’s a few areas where we can work slightly differently with customs, we can lean up some processes, increase efficiency and that will also have a positive impact back to our customers so the combination of these measures and also the way that we marshal trucks in the yard that will create some additional capacity for the immediate future.”