Russia’s Port of St Petersburg is struggling to recover from weeks of delays brought on by freezing weather covering much of the entry access to the Baltic Sea facility in ice, which at its height stranded an estimated 180 ships in port.
Beginning in mid-February and lasting through the whole of March, sheets of ice prevented normal functioning at the port, with vessels only able to reach the facility through the use of multiple icebreaker ships.
During the worst of the freeze, refrigerated containers carrying potatoes and other products from western Europe reportedly suffered heavy losses of perishable goods after considerable delays in reaching St Petersburg.
For those vessels that did make it through the ice, with perishable loads largely given priority by the port authorities over other cargoes, importers then faced distribution problems, with trucks delayed or prevented from reaching the port by heavy snows.
With temperatures beginning to rise during the past week, St Petersburg’s troubled fresh produce sector is optimistic that normal shipments will be able to resume and that the ice will clear completely by May.
Dmitriy Gerasimov from Russian importer JFresh, which is part of the JFC Group, told Fruitnet that the situation had improved considerably during the week, although the port was still operating with “minor delays”.
“The situation is still tough, but the weather is getting better and I don’t think there will still be a lot of ice by May,” he said.
However, one US exporter told Fruitnet that the “big crisis” at the port had caused considerable problems for his company’s shipments to Russia.
He said: “The port is frozen, there is over 150 vessels waiting to enter the port and all our product is about two weeks delayed. We have over 60 containers waiting to be released, so we been working on damage control night and day the past few days.”
At the height of the freeze during mid March, Marat Mustafaev, from fellow St Petersburg-based importer RGS, said that they were up to 180 ships stranded in the port, with some container vessels hit by a delay of “about a month”.
Although the ice sheets have now begun to melt, Mr Mustafaev estimated there were still around 60 ships delayed in the port.
Mr Gerasimov said that all of St Peterburg’s importers had been affected by the freeze, with many having to cope with delays to deliveries of “one to two, even in some cases three weeks”.
However, he added: “Some problems still remain – I’m waiting for one container that arrived on week 12 and it’s now week 14 and it’s still not in my warehouse. There are still some delays with some containers, but in general the situation has improved.”
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