Decision on Elbe Dredging Urgent

Court decision on the implementation of the widening and deepening of the navigation channel on the Lower and Outer Elbe is urgently needed this year, according to the Port of Hamburg officials.

The widening and deepening of the channel is of particular importance especially having in mind that forecast growth in freight traffic, according to Ingo Egloff of Port of Hamburg Marketing’s Executive Board.

The urgency of the situation is further stressed by the fact that in 2014 ultra large containerships made 507 calls in Hamburg.

“So we had around 24 percent more calls by containerships with slot capacities of over 10,000 TEU than in the previous year. Even the most obstinate opponents of modification of the channel must slowly recognize that to re-route such a large number of ocean-going ships to other ports would be by no means simple,” stressed Egloff.

In Egloff’s view transport routes to the seaports must rate top priority in the new Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan agreed this year. For Egloff, functioning transport routes properly equipped to handle further volume growth are a guarantee for smooth supplies for the country’s industry. These are also in the interest of the national economy as a whole.

“Around 260,000 jobs throughout the country, 110,000 of them outside the Hamburg Metropolitan Region, are directly or indirect related to the Port of Hamburg. Countrywide added value of almost 20 billion euros means that the Port of Hamburg’s significance extends far inland,” emphasized Egloff.

Action is also urgently required, on the repeatedly delayed finalization of the Elbe Concept for inland waterway shipping, Egloff said. Latest reports suggest that this has been shelved until 2017.

“It is unacceptable that inland waterway shipping in our country should operate only on the Rhine and in the West, with the Middle and Upper Elbe remaining neglected and under-developed as a waterway. We cannot afford to completely overlook existing transport infrastructure that would be useful for coping with increasing volumes requiring transport, or to ignore this in planning transport routes,” he went on to say.