Sunday, August 25, 2013
President Uhuru Kenyatta will on
Wednesday commission a new berth to ease congestion at the port of
Mombasa at a ceremony to be attended by Presidents Yoweri Museveni of
Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda. The new facility
will increase the port’s container handling capacity by 200,000
twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs)containers a year.
Berth 19 will allow three Panamax vessels of up to 250 metres in length to unload containers at any given moment.
The Sh5.8 billion project includes an additional 15-acre staking yard that adds a further capacity of 200,000 TEUs per annum.
Kenya
Ports Authority managing director Gichiri Ndua said the new 240-metre
long berth brings the length of the quay at the busy contaioner terminal
to 840 metres.
Mr Ndua said the new berth is one of
two key Vision 2030 flagship projects launched in July 2011 and said it
would speed up the delivery of cargo to Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi,
DRC, northern Tanzania, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia.
The
KPA boss said container traffic through the port of Mombasa has
increased a thousand-fold from the recorded 903,463 TEUs in 2012
compared to 9,093 TEUs in 1978. The port was originally designed to
handle 250,000 TEUs.
The construction of the second
container terminal is ongoing and divided into two phases. Berths 20 and
21, measuring 350 metres and 250 metres respectively and 15 metres
deep, are expected to be ready by the end of 2015.