The U.S. Coast Guard’s announcement last week that it wouldn’t object to two alternative methods of verifying container weights set in motion a high-stakes game of chicken between carriers and exporters. It is also fueling a fight among ports seeking to present themselves as the most user-friendly to shippers struggling to comply with the new rule.
Now that the Coast Guard has indicated that container lines can add together a container’s contents and tare weight to calculate the verified gross mass required to meet new the new weight rules, some shippers are demanding that their carriers take this approach.
Meanwhile, the South Carolina Ports Authority has thrown down the gauntlet to other ports in the Southeast, and perhaps even nationally, by offering to weigh containers and generate VGM documentation for export loads. Use of this Coast Guard-sanctioned alternative has spurred other ports to rethink their own responses to the July 1 implementation of the VGM rule under the International Maritime Organization’s SOLAS convention.
