In past issues of Portfolio we have told you about our General Manager/CEO, Sean Matthew, Director of Seaports, Adrian Hilaire and even our Senior Management Team, but behind the scenes there is a highly skilled team at SLASPA who work very hard to ensure that customers get their cargo and goods on time, every time. In this edition of Portfolio, we will focus on our Operations Equipment Operators who perform one of the most important roles at the seaport; they are Jerome Modeste, Thomas Marcellin, Leonard Daniel, Henks Hollingsworth, Mathis Phillip and Noel Gaspard. Together, this six-member team operates our reachstackers and our crane which we affectionately call Blue Boy because of its stature and of course, its colour.

In case you are lost, a reachstacker is a very flexible machine that has the capacity to quickly transport containers from one location on the port to another and the versatility of stacking them into rows of varying heights. The crane, which is a mobile harbour crane, facilitates the movement of containers from the vessel to the dock and vice versa. When a container is offloaded from a vessel, the reachstackers would normally transport them from the landing site to the appropriate storage stack. Later, when a truck comes to the port to collect a container for a customer; the reachstacker would then retrieve the container from the stack and safely place it onto the truck for onward delivery to that customer. It takes considerable skill and precision for an operator to execute this process without damaging the container and its contents.

Perfect hand to eye coordination is a must in order to pick up a container that is sometimes stacked four high on the port (which is higher than eye level) and place it flawlessly onto the slots of the awaiting truck for onward transportation to the container’s final destination. The same goes for sitting 23 meters above the ground in the cabin of the crane, looking down to move containers from ship to shore for imported cargo and from shore to ship for exported cargo. Combined, they have over 50 years of service and this highly skilled technical team makes the task of moving containers look so easy with the way they do it so seamlessly and effortlessly with consummate expertise even working long and late hours to ensure that all customers get their goods on time.

Recently, two of our crane operators, Noel Gaspard and Jerome Modeste, became certified crane operators and are now able to operate the LHM 3200 and LHM 1200 cranes in any part of the world. Noel Gaspard can move as many as 30 to 40 containers in an hour from ship to shore; this is the most number of moves recorded in St. Lucia and of a comparable standard to that attained in leading regional ports!

Our crane operators have travelled to ports in neighbouring Caribbean islands to train and provide assistance to up-and-coming operators with their cargo operations. To ensure that they remain on top of their game and keep abreast with the changes that occur in the industry, SLASPA provides them with training both locally, regionally and internationally.

To put things into perspective, without our equipment operators moving the containers from the ship to the shore then you just might not be driving your car today as it may have come in a container that one of our skilled operators offloaded from a vessel.