Splash247: Ports grapple with the age of burst congestion

Published by Splash247

Ports increasingly face a problem that cannot be solved simply by looking at annual capacity: too many ships arriving at exactly the wrong time.

A port can have enough cranes, berths and yard space to handle its annual cargo volumes and still grind to a halt.

Welcome to the age of burst congestion, one of the defining operational problems confronting container ports as wars, extreme weather and increasingly erratic liner schedules send ships arriving in clusters rather than neatly spaced across the week.

The World Bank and S&P Global highlighted the phenomenon prominently in this year’s Container Port Performance Index, defining burst congestion as short, intense periods of clustered vessel arrivals capable of overwhelming berths, yards and landside connections. There is plenty of it around.

As Splash Ports reported this week, more than 4.3m teu of containership capacity is currently waiting to berth globally, an absolute record surpassing the covid-era peak.

The underlying problem is not simply how much cargo a port handles, but when it arrives.

Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence, described vessel bunching as creating “an extraordinarily high workload in one week and none in the second week”.

“This clearly increases the risk of port congestion,” Murphy said, with the knock-on effects quickly spreading to truck, rail and barge networks.

Rotterdam sees the same dynamic. “Delays upstream become pressure points downstream,” Hanna Stelzel, the Port of Rotterdam’s director of containers, said earlier this year, arguing that many problems labelled as port congestion are actually symptoms of wider supply chain disruption.

“Once the schedule reliability of the deepsea container vessels is very low, it always leads to ripple effects further down the chain,” Stelzel said.

A terminal might comfortably handle 10 ships spread evenly across a week but struggle badly when five arrive within 24 hours following typhoons, port omissions or diversions around a geopolitical flashpoint.

The result is an increasingly familiar one in the 2020s: anchorages fill, cranes and labour become oversubscribed, yards reach critical density and trucks struggle to remove boxes quickly enough.

The weakest link is not necessarily the berth. Hapag-Lloyd CEO Rolf Habben Jansen warned during a recent discussion of a potential return to Suez routings that his biggest concern was terminal yards.

“The real problem will be the capacity of our customers to pull inventory from the terminal yards,” he said.

Maersk has repeatedly urged customers at congested European ports this year to collect import containers rapidly, arguing that prompt pickup is essential to protecting terminal operations as vessel delays drive up yard density.

At some northern European terminals, yards have recently been running at 85% to 90% utilisation, while elsewhere ports have been forced into diversions and port omissions to prevent operations spiralling further.

Jan Hoffmann, global lead for maritime transport and ports at the World Bank, told Splash Ports that external disruption increasingly complicates port performance.

“If ships arrive less predictably, then burst congestion can occur,” Hoffmann said, pointing to Suez, Hormuz, Panama and broader trade volatility.

The obvious answer is more infrastructure, although terminals cannot build a new berth every time schedules deteriorate. Ports therefore need greater flexibility: spare yard capacity, adaptable labour arrangements, off-dock storage, extended gate hours and stronger rail and barge networks capable of absorbing sudden peaks.

Digital coordination is becoming equally important. Rotterdam has been testing joint feeder berth planning after finding that continuing variability in deepsea arrivals, multiple terminal calls and the absence of shared planning were contributing to increased waiting times. The port argues that better coordination and “controlled transparency” between competing players can unlock capacity already present in the system.

Just-in-time arrival can help too.

“JIT arrival allows ships to optimize speed during their voyage to arrive in port when berth, fairway and nautical services are available,” explained Andreas van der Wurff, A.P. Moller-Maersk’s port optimisation manager in a recent release.

None of this eliminates disruption. Ports cannot control wars, droughts or typhoons. What they can control is how quickly the system reacts when six ships suddenly appear where planners expected two. Resilience today increasingly means designing not for the average Tuesday, but for the Friday morning when six Tuesdays arrive at once.