On May 23, Waterborne Transport Affairs Center of Hunan Province held a special meeting to ensure the smooth waterborne logistics, developed and deployed the crucial work focusing on channel operation monitoring, ship lockage optimization, key material transportation deployment, crew services and others. ZHANG Sheng, Secretary of the Party Committee and Director of the center, presided over the meeting.
In order to deal with waterborne blockage, transportation delay, port shutdown and other serious problems caused by COVID-19, Hunan province has coordinated the prevention and control of the pandemic and logistics to ensure its smoothness, established the mechanism to support the smooth waterborne freight, and implemented the full-time tracking and dynamic control system for ships at risk of the pandemic. Thanks to these measures, the transmission chain of the pandemic has been interrupted effectively and there is no accident during water transportation.
At present, Hunan’s port terminals are open as much as possible, which makes great contribution to smooth transportation. At the same time, for ships with medical prevention and control materials and important production and living materials, Hunan has taken some measures such as priority pilotage, lockage, berthing, docking and unberthing, and established material supply channel and port nucleic acid test channel for crew to minimize the impact of the pandemic on waterborne transportation.
From January to April this year, Hunan reached 72.530 million tons of cargo volume through waterborne transportation, and 12.34 billion tons of freight turnover through inland waterway, which are up by 8.8% and 9.3% respectively year on year. And it achieved 60.463 million tons of above-all cargo throughput of port, and 304,600 TEU of container throughput, an increase of 18.7% and 16.2% respectively year on year. The whole province reached 114.92 billion yuan of foreign trade goods with among 70% of them are dependent on water transport in the first quarter.
Translated from: News of Traffic in China