Ship Openings Not Favoured

Press, Volume CV, Issue 31017, 24 March 1966, Page 1

Ship Openings Not Favoured

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, March 23.

Shipping lines do not favour cutting apertures in the sides of their vessels to facilitate side loading. They consider mechanical conveyer systems on the wharf should be designed to handle cargo through conventional hatchways.

The reasons are given in a report from the overseas shipowners’ committee to the transport committee, which was considered by the Exports and Shipping Council at its meeting today.

The report says that shipping lines in the New Zealand trade used the method before World War 11, but dispensed with the openings because no benefits accrued, and because there was a certain lack of labour co-operation.

Most vessels in the New Zealand trade were not fitted with such side-loading ports, and providing them in existing ships would involve major alterations, including re-siting of buried brine leads and airtrunking in refrigerated compartments.

Many vessels were fitted with gas-tight chilled beef lockers, and it would be most undesirable to have such openings in them. Some difficulty had been met in the past through the side ports not remaining watertight. The rise and fall of the ship with the tides would limit the period during which side meat loading ports could be worked. In some trades ships had been built with the emphasis on handling cargo in unit loads—or pallets or in containers—through relatively large openings in ships’ sides, using fork lift trucks for loading

“However, we have doubts as to the satisfactory application of this method of loading to the New Zealand trade

because the outward cargoes are not wholly suited to this type of loading, and because the greatest volume of homeward general cargoes is wool.” says the report.