Prime Freight’s summary of an October 2021 report by The Maritime Executive. Read the original for the full story.
On 12 October 2021 container terminals in Shenzhen, the wider Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong stopped work as Tropical Storm Kompasu approached.
Yantian International Container Terminal shut its gates just after midnight, Hong Kong issued its second typhoon warning in a few days, and harbour ferries were suspended. The storm had already caused deadly flooding and landslides in the Philippines and was expected to pass south of Hong Kong before heading for northern Vietnam.
The closures hit ports that were already backed up. Yantian normally handles more than 100 container ships a week and over 13 million TEU a year, and its queue had passed 60 ships after a Covid outbreak in June; Bloomberg now put the number waiting there at 67, the most since late August. It was the second storm in a month to close major Chinese ports, after Typhoon Chanthu shut Shanghai and Ningbo in mid-September.
What it meant for shippers
Even a short typhoon closure adds days at ports that are already congested, because vessels and trucks queue again when gates reopen. In typhoon season, allowing slack around South China cut-offs and checking terminal notices before trucking cargo helps avoid extra costs.
What happened next
The terminals reopened within days, but the number of ships off Shenzhen and Hong Kong climbed to 271 (Bloomberg).