Whether or not you feel war is ever justified, it happens and once it has, the sooner the international community commits to the reconstruction effort, the better. Inevitably, the port – if there is one – plays a crucial role. If there isn’t one, there needs to be to cope with the often overwhelming flow of relief supplies, equipment and materials needed just to start the task of getting a war-torn country and its infrastructure back on its feet. And the same goes for natural disasters of course. The provision of such facilities in logistical and engineering terms, right through to encouraging often reluctant private investment in ports in a post-conflict situation, is the subject of our Special Report this month.<\/p>\n
On a somewhat different scale, editors have to make choices too. In a magazine like this, which does not profess to tackle technical issues in great depth but rather focuses on management and commercial matters, the question arises:<\/p>\n
what level of knowledge can we expect our typical reader to have. The answer is awkward of course since every reader is an individual with his or her own level of knowledge. So we make a judgement call.<\/p>\n
Kevin Chinnery’s feature on yard cranes is a case in point.<\/p>\n
Many readers will be familiar with the pros and cons of straddle carriers, RTGs and RMGs. But we have politicians, lawyers, bankers and other professionals amongst our readers, not to mention the constant flow of new people into the industry, who will not be so familiar. What makes this feature especially interesting though is that it shows graphically how such equipment choices – hard choices again – are often influenced by political, labour-related or other factors that have little to do with purely technical and operational considerations. This broader view of the complexities of running ports and terminals is very much the way we try to see things throughout the magazine.<\/p>\n
Security concerns continue to pervade the ports industry.<\/p>\n
In this issue we juxtapose two security stories with very different messages. On the one hand David Foxwell reports on some clever harbour surveillance gear. On the other, the TT Club gives some useful tips on loss prevention with emphasis on the people factor.<\/p>\n
We also preview TOC Asia which runs in Hong Kong this month. For me it’s an opportunity to return to that remarkable port having lived there for many through the seventies and eighties. It will be my first visit since leaving in 1993 – and that was another hard choice. The place has changed but I know it will be good to be back. Nick Elliott<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Life is about making choices – some harder than others. And choices have consequences. But once a course has been chosen – right or wrong – then what is done is done and anyway its usually impossible to reverse back the way youve come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[94],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-6967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-viewpoint"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6967"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=6967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}