KLANG: Hauliers are crying foul over the massive daily congestion at Westport here which they claim has led to major financial losses.
Checks by the New Straits Times yesterday showed that traffic was severely disrupted at the Customs checkpoint, with truck drivers blaming a faulty IT system and closure of half the lanes there.
Sources said industry players have been facing the dire situation for nearly two months.
Things were made worse last week when the Customs’ IT system broke down.
“This is the worst congestion that has ever happened. Normally, the Customs check takes about 45 minutes, gate-in, gate-out. Now, one container pick-up may take up to four hours. If compared to Northport, the traffic there is bearable,” one of them said.
There are about 200 hauliers registered with port operator Westports Holdings Bhd, involving about 300 container movements a day for export and import.
“Besides a faulty IT system, the infrastructure at Westport cannot handle the high volume of containers. The Customs check at the gate is supposed to take two minutes, but now it takes longer than that.
“There are usually about 300 movements a day, but now we are struggling to do 250,” the source said, adding that lanes had been halved from 14 to seven.
Another source said industry players would have to pay a minimum storage charge of RM300 for a container delay. This eats into the truck drivers’ earning, causing many to quit and leave the haulage sector with a shortage of manpower.
“When we delay pick-up, there will be storage charges of a minimum RM300 per container. We are forced to absorb the charges. But the mistake is not ours, it’s someone else’s,” he said.
Association of Malaysian Hauliers president Nazari Akhbar confirmed the massive traffic congestion, but declined to comment yesterday.
Customs Department deputy director-general Datuk T. Subromaniam said a contractor carrying out roadworks at Westport had accidentally damaged the fibre optics running underground.
“The roadworks were carried two or three weeks ago. Due to the faulty fibre optics, it has affected the front-end system which was used to record declarations of the consignments going through the port.
“Following that, we have to declare all consignments manually or truck drivers must enter Westport using the Northport gate,” he said yesterday.
The front-end system is a computer system unit used to control the data communications link between terminals and the main computer. Every consignment must go through the front-end system to declare their items.
Subromaniam said the issue had been resolved about three or four days ago and all the systems at Westport should be working normally.
He, however, expressed surprise that there was still massive congestion there.
“We will look into this matter to ensure that the system is back to normal and there will be no congestion at Westport as reported.”
