Breakwater construction of Vizhinjam port completed, trial run by June, says Minister

Breakwater construction of Vizhinjam port completed, trial run by June, says Minister

The work on the 3,100-metre-long breakwater of the Vizhinjam International Seaport in Thiruvananthapuram has been completed.

The first trial run of port operations, including loading and unloading of containers from the port by bringing containers to the port on large barges, will begin by the second week of June. This would be followed by the commercial launch of the port by Onam as a gift to the State, said Ports Minister V.N. Vasavan.

The Minister said this after visiting the breakwater site, cranes delivered to the port by a Chinese-based company, and other ancillary works being held at the port here on Thursday. He also visited the control unit of the cranes, from where the operations of large ship-to-shore cranes and yard cranes to be manned using an automatic system. 

He also said that the Adani Group, which constructs the port, has informed that all the technical support systems and experts needed for the operations have been arranged for the trial run of the port. So far, a total of 21 cranes have been brought in here out of the order of 32 cranes, including eight Rail Mounted Quay Cranes (RMQC) and 24 numbers of Rail Mounted Gantry Cranes (RMGC), given to the China based Shanghai Zhenhua Port Machinery Company Limited (ZPMC) in 2018. 

Two more ships carrying the remaining cranes are on the voyage to Vizhinjam. The installation and trial run of 15 cranes which arrived here earlier have been fully completed. Vizhinjam International Deepwater Multipurpose Seaport is a major infrastructure project promoted by the State government in public-private partnership mode jointly with Adani Vizhinjam Port Private Limited.