About 20 forty foot containers with many tonnes of ripening papayas are sitting at the Port of Belize tonight awaiting export. They were supposed to be shipped out early yesterday morning but that didn’t happen because the Port of Belize was at a standstill. 7NEWS has confirmed that operations at the pier head were forced into an operational shutdown due to equipment failure.
On Sunday night the crane which loads and offloads the cargo ships broke down, leaving the Carib Mariner with half its freight still onboard. There’s no back up for the critical piece of heavy equipment and so the ship stayed in port with nothing happening for over 36 hours. When there appeared to be no short term solution, this morning, Caribbean Shipping, which is the agent for the Mariner, decided to cut is losses and ship out – leaving half the cargo bound for Belize onboard the mariner. Everything that was due for export, including much of the papayas destined for Miami was left on the dock.
CEO of the Port of Belize Limited Reynaldo Guerrero told us that the company is aware of the urgency and today sent someone to Miami to pick up the part and bring it in tomorrow.
And so how it is that Belize’s sovereign port doesn’t have a backup crane? Well Guerrero told us that they do, in the form of a preferred arrangement with Lopez Equipment. But Lopez’s cranes are presently out of the city working with Belize Natural Energy and won’t be in until Wednesday night. He expects that by that time, the port’s crane will be repaired, and if not Lopez’s crane will be working by Thursday. And it better be because 4 ships requiring the crane are scheduled to arrive at the end of the week.
The ship that arrived today was offloaded because it has its own crane.
