NO SPACE PROBLEMS IN MIDSTREAM

Well if you are in Hong Kong, you invest a few more million dollars in midstream barges, those engineless craft equipped with a stick crane and crane operators, and a few midstream stevedores, duly shod in sneakers and ready to make up for the fact that the Pearl of the Orient is very short of flat space and especially short of hardstand in the container ports. At first it is difficult to credit the evidence of one’s eyes. The mid-stream barge is lashed alongside a container feedership. The ship moves, the barge moves and the stick crane sort of flips containers from ship to barge, or vice versa, with a minimum of fuss, but with some metal to metal grinding. It is not exactly what one expects to find in the capital city of containerisation.

Yet every time the port of Hong Kong runs close to capacity constraints, the midstream industry steps in to take up the slack.

Nowadays, the big fellows have worked their way into the industry.

Instead of a good old Hakka fellow who owns a few barges and doesn’t much like to wear leather shoes, ship operators are likely to be dealing with a division of Hutchison Port Holdings, who nowadays operate a good part of the midstream industry.

Few places on earth have hurried to emulate the example of the midstream. One wonders why. Is it the availability of ample land for the purposes of expansion? Even Singapore seems to have more of this than Hong Kong. Is it the relatively low freeboard required from the ships needing stevedoring?

Or is it the sheer unlikelihood of taking containers out of modern ships using relatively low tech, high sweat methods?

Hard to say. At any rate the midstream methods have not much spread throughout Asia, let alone the rest of the world. It is said there are a few working in the Philipinnes where the influence of the Hong Kong Chinese is stronger than you might think.

The rest of the world uses tug and barge approaches. Lighters come alongside and the cranes come either from the ship or the shore.

Traditionally the commodities concerned were ore, coal, aggregates, grain, so no-one lost sleep when something went wrong and the barge turned turtle. The container era has changed all that. In the event of damage, the lighter interests are unlikely to succeed nowadays with the defence that their trading conditions call them to limit their liability to the scrap value of the lost lighter (i. e. not much at all).

The lesson from all this is that if you are the carrier of containers and you are likely to have your containers collected not onto the quay but into the capacious bottom of a harbour barge, better first ask what the stevedores will do if the said containers topple into the drink. A minimum modern standard these days is no less that 2 SDRs per kilogramme in the event of loss or damage. Is this what your contractor is offering in his standard trading conditions?

This kind of thing is subject to the forces of approximation which have long governed the container industry. It is no use one sector holding out for special exemptions if it is caught holding the baby. It is far easier for all concerned to offer something like the same standards of care and limits of liability. This is the logic of intermodality. There are no special cases from the Pearl River Delta to the inbound ports of Rotterdam or New Jersey.