09/18/2008 07h52
São Sebastião to receive containers
Valor Econômico - 09/18/2008
The port of São Sebastião, on the north coast of São Paulo, is getting ready to draw a weekly load of container ships, in the cabotage line. The port plans to take advantage of the industrial potential of the region of
Vale do Paraíba and the region of Campinas. An inventory of the high added value cargos of these regions is underway by the direction of Companhia Docas de São Sebatião, the state-owned administrator of the port. The goal of the company is to load nearly 500 containers a week. In the period of twelve months ended in August, São Sebastião grew 28% in cargo volume, amounting to 620.2 thousand tons. In order to handle the container ships, the port of São Paulo prepared an 8.20-meter deep berth. For the other types of services, the management has recovered its internal deck, increasing it from two meters to seven meters of depth. The port went through an institutional reformulation. It left the sphere of the Dersa (Highway Development Company) to turn into a state-owned company and carried out several infrastructure works. That allowed attracting now cargos. In the more than 620 thousand tons of the last twelve months, 246 thousand tons of soda ash, a traditional product in the port, are included. São Sebastião, however, grew with the activity of sulphur in bulk, live animals, seedlings and pipes aimed at the Petrobrás Mexilhão project, in the equivalent to 91 thousand tons. The live animals and fruit plant seedlings are destined to African countries, especially Angola, whose local species have been decimated by civil wars. Among the shipped animals are oxen, horses, kids and pigs. After November, according to Frederico Bussinger, president of Docas de São Sebastião, the port will load a new special cargo - tanks for citrus juices - ordered to Dedini from Piracicaba (SP). They are metal and self-refrigerated parts of 12 meters of diameter and 17 meters of height, with capacity above one thousand cubic meters, which will be used by juice exporters. The port reserved an area of 10 thousand square meters for the Piracicaba industry to finish the assembly of the tanks. Besides the Docas' 50 salaried employees and its 150 freelance workers, 386 jobs were added in 28 companies that work in different sectors in the terminal of São Sebastião. With the recent works, including four mooring berths, the port estimates it may reach an activity of up to two million tons/year. With the future expansions there is the perspective of handling 1.5 million containers a year.
