Some 1.9 million TEU in capacity caught up during the week-long closure of the Suez Canal are starting to swamp already overburdened ports around the

globe.

According to project44, a supply chain visibility company, the cargo ships making their way to ports in the wake of the Suez Canal incident, have cumulative delays of 1,017 days, threatening to overwhelm ports with bottlenecked cargo "for weeks to come."

The firm is now warning shippers that their "headaches are not yet over."

"At major ports such as Singapore, more than 370,000 TEU of capacity are en route to the port, where 83 vessels representing 299,310 TEU were already at the port or anchored and waiting to unload as of April 12," project44 said in a statement.

It noted that the picture is similar at Rotterdam, where 15 ships representing 196,600 TEU will arrive over the next week, lining up behind 85 ships already at port or waiting to enter the port.

The supply chain visibility firm added that other major ports bracing for the influx of volume are New York, with 76,500 TEU either having arrived or still inbound from the Suez Canal incident; Port Kelang, at 103,900 TEU; and Jebel Ali, at 75,879 TEU.

The largest volume impacts are, not surprisingly, set to hit some of the main hubs on the Asia – Europe trade where most of the ships in the Suez Canal were bound to.

"According to project44’s port delay tracking, the influx of ships will also exacerbate port delays measured in days. With delays on major trade routes like Shanghai — Rotterdam already close to the one-week mark — a worrying increase over 2020, when median port delays on the same route were 2.79 days," it said.

Meanwhile, it added that other routes where delays are on track to get worse include Shanghai — New York, where the median March delay was 8.05 days (up from 1.09 days in March 2020); Shenzhen — Hamburg, where median delays last month were 9.23 days (up from 3.52 days in March 2020); and Shenzen — Newark-Elisabeth, where me-dian delays reached 12.92 in March (up from 0.29 days in March 2020).

”The Suez Canal incident brings home the message that shippers must be prepared for unexpected disruptions in their supply chain. With real-time visibility and advanced alerting capabilities, disruptions as well as the ability to form strategies to avoid them, are more manageable than ever before,” said Josh Brazil VP Marketing project44.