The passage of the merchant megaship APL Yangshan, 347 meters long and 45.2 meters wide, through the port of Santos ended this Wednesday (9) with worrying consequences for the already chaotic ferry crossing system between Santos and Guarujá, on the south coast of São Paulo.
The projection of specialists and the SPA itself (Santos Port Authority, which manages the port) is that more vessels of this size, or even larger, will increase the frequency of use of the port as a route in the coming months. Typically, ships passing through the port are on average 225 meters.
In October, the Maltese-flagged vessel CMA CGM Vela, also measuring 347 meters, stopped port activities for almost three hours and mobilized six tugboats in the process to be able to dock on the left bank, on the Guarujá side.
The interruption caused by the Singapore ship this Tuesday (8) took place between 1:30 pm and 3 pm, following the determination of the Port Authority, according to ordinance 74/2021, and the Brazilian Navy. This Wednesday, the interruption was from 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm.
🇧🇷[A vinda desses navios] is planned and a consequence for the offer that the port has prepared, it only delayed a little due to the pandemic. We were unable to make a frequency estimate. It will be more common next year, but it depends on the world trade flow,” he told Sheet Bruno Stupello, SPA’s Director of Business Development and Regulation.
“These megaships are common in the northern hemisphere, but they are coming to the southern route as well. It is a market trend that shipowners start to operate not only east-west, with Asia and the USA, but also north-south,” he said.
Reflecting this trend, at the beginning of the month, the port of Rio Grande, in Rio Grande do Sul, received the Asian freighter One Amazon, 330 meters long, which left Busan, South Korea.
According to the latest PDZ (Development and Zoning Plan for the port of Santos), the projection for an increase in the volume of cargo is almost 50% over the next 20 years: over 67.9 million tons, jumping to 214.9 million tons of total demand.
The trend is that the arrival of new large vessels will cause less impact on operations over time — except for the ferry system that transports vehicles.
In this case, for safety reasons, users cannot even wait with the vehicles positioned on the vessels, due to the risk of waves caused by the maneuvers. During the day, stoppages of approximately 15 minutes are common for the passage of smaller ships.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, however, the waiting time was 1 hour and 30 minutes and 1 hour, respectively. The users of the crossing were guided by the City Hall of Santos and by the Department of Logistics and Transport to make the journey by land.
“This is an issue in which the ferry user will always be penalized. The tendency, we already know, is for this to occur more frequently. There is no alternative ferry route, hence the importance of an urgent dry connection”, said the Secretary of Logistics and Transport of the State of São Paulo, João Octaviano Machado.
According to the Waterway Department, the crossing operation between the municipalities today has worked, on average, with 5 ferries — the limit is 7, with one in reserve.
“If new large ships appear, it will be useless to operate with seven ferries. We will have to stop anyway”, said the secretary.
In Santos, the daily volume between Santos and Guarujá in the month of September was 28,999 tickets, according to data from the ministry. The number is calculated based on 13,554 vehicles and 8,234 motorcycles, in addition to 7,034 cyclists and 177 pedestrians.
The proposed alternatives, in turn, are still far from getting off the ground. In recent years, the dry connection project between Santos and Guarujá has been stalled, due to the controversy over which would be the best route: a bridge, defended by the state government, or a submerged tunnel, preferred by the port authority, by the federal government and driven by by the “Vou de Túnel” movement, led by a group of naval engineers, companies and associations.
“We have always defended that bridges and tunnels are not mutually exclusive, we need the bridge connecting the right bank to the left and the tunnel for urban mobility”, stated Secretary Octaviano.
“Today the process is experiencing a handbrake pull with the change of government. The issue of the Fla-Flu bridge or tunnel is something overdue. We will need a new legal and regulatory model, a new undertaking to get it off the ground”, he said Casemiro Tércio, former president of SPA and one of the mentors of “Vou de Túnel”.
The last alternative cited by the state government is to accelerate the feasibility of the green line (a new highway to the port), announced in March 2021, as a route that would alleviate the Anchieta-Imigrantes system, with the creation of new logistics between Santos and São Paulo.
There is still no definition of a route, but the projection is that the connection will connect the ring road, in the capital, with the left bank of the port.
“It’s still in the modeling phase. We don’t have a conclusion about the route, the construction time or the executive project yet”, said Octaviano.
In September, the Waterway Department started to operate another ferry, renovated with an investment of R$ 4.5 million and capacity for 50 vehicles, in addition to 150 passengers.
Days before the new ferry, residents of both cities had to wait for hours due to the slow crossing, compromised by adverse weather conditions, according to the department.
For the beginning of the season, during Operation Summer, the estimate is that the movement between the two will increase by up to 40%.
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