By Pacific Island Times News Staff
The Port Authority of Guam’s Gantry crane 6 is back online after being inoperational as a result of issues with the computer board due to water damage from Typhoon Mawar.
“Placing Gantry 6 back online increases the port’s cargo handling capacity and expedites the flow of critical commodities into our community,” said Port General Manager Rory J. Respicio.
“The port is nearly caught up with the pre-storm vessel sequence schedule and will continue to make progress to bring the port to its pre-storm capacity," he added.
Matson’s Manoa container vessel arrived dockside at 8:56 a.m. today.
Port employees are working non-stop to discharge 342 containers for Guam while the remaining 75 are slated for transshipment.
As of 3 p.m. 77 or nearly 20 percent containers were offloaded utilizing Gantry 5. As of 4:50 p.m., Gantry 6 was placed in service and will work to unload the Monoa along with Gantry 5.
The port authority issued out a total of 52 hand-held land mobile radio devices it had received yesterday from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to support cargo operations.
Two emergency communications programmers with FEMA spent the morning programming the radio devices, channels, and testing the units throughout port facilities located at Cabras Island.
These devices have a 1-2 mile operational radius so radio testing within Port facilities spanned from the terminal yard, gatehouse, along Route 11 to Hotel Wharf. The results were positive with all areas covered.
By 11 a.m., port representatives were provided an orientation on the use and capabilities of the radio devices and issued units based on their organizational and operational needs.
“These devices will provide communication within the terminal yard to facilitate cargo operations,” said Respicio. “Additionally, our information technology division was able to reconnect our system to the gatehouse allowing operations to move away from the pen-to-paper methodology and back to digital cargo clearance processes.