Sea Malta yesterday criticised the inflexibility of port workers, who forced its vessel the mv Maltese Falcon to spend 21 hours in port on Monday because they were not available to handle cargo.
Sea Malta said the ship made port at the scheduled time but because all port workers had been engaged on other ships, there was none available to work on the Sea Malta vessel.
"Shortage of berthing space for a ship the size of the Maltese Falcon has further compounded the state of affairs at Laboratory Wharf," Sea Malta said.
The company said the vessel had completed the weekly voyage between Tunis, Marseilles, Genoa and Malta. Due to the activity in Grand Harbour at the time, the ship was allocated a berth at around 2 p.m. but there were no gangs of port workers available to offload and load the vessel with exports.
"Although Sea Malta had all the necessary crew, equipment and tug masters available to effect its own direct cargo operation, the current port regulations prohibited them from carrying it out even though the port workers were unavailable.
"Had the port workers been flexible, they could have easily sent someone to oversee the operation being performed by Sea Malta staff and get paid as if they did it themselves," general manager Joseph Bugeja said when contacted.
Because of this "ridiculous situation", 53 trailers and 24 containers with a mixture of cargoes, ranging from perishables to hazardous chemicals, were stranded on board. The only concession was to allow ashore a truck with livestock, Sea Malta said.
"This also meant that the ship lost the carriage of cargo usually loaded on Monday to Genoa and Tunis, with loss of revenue to the Maltese line," the company said.
Efforts to find a solution by Sea Malta chairman Marlene Mizzi and Mr Bugeja proved futile and port workers were only made available at the 8 a.m. shift yesterday. This meant a delay of 21 hours.
Mrs Mizzi said this unprecedented delay would affect the vessel's operations for the rest of this week and possibly the next.
"It is such absurd situations with substantial loss of revenue to ship owners which prompted the European Union to change port regulations to allow crew members to effect discharge operations."
However, she said, port workers had been intransigent and impractical.
Mr Bugeja said Sea Malta strove hard to operate on a punctual timetable because several members in local industry worked on the just-in-time concept, having goods delivered to them only as they needed them at the eleventh hour.
The General Workers' Union said it was not the workers' fault that none were available at the time because they were engaged on other duties.
The union said it wanted to extend its sympathy to Sea Malta but argued that the EU's proposal to liberalise work at the ports was being opposed by many European unions.
However, it seemed that some in Malta were trying to find excuses to adopt it.
No one from the Malta Maritime Authority was available for comment.