By purchasing two modern mobile cranes worth around 10 and a half million euros, the Port of Bar will replace three transshipment bridges that were demolished on July 2 after hurricane-force winds, the director of the port, Ilija Pješcic, said for our program "Mirno more". He also says that if the state does not invest significant funds in the port, railway and road infrastructure as soon as possible, the Port of Bar has no chance to compete with the competition on the Adriatic Sea in the long term.
Two days after July 2nd, a storm with winds of over 200 km/h hit the largest Montenegrin commercial port and collapsed three transshipment bridges and a grain loading tower, the government gave a preliminary estimate that the material damage is around 35 million euros.
"The estimate of 35 million was taken due to the acquisition of new, identical cranes. However, when we saw that in addition to a huge amount of money, it would also require planning on the coast itself and positioning the cranes on some new rail systems, we decided to reorient ourselves to mobile port cranes, which are much more grateful when it comes to handling, and cheaper. For about 10.5 million, which would be the cost of two mobile port cranes equivalent to the ones we have now, we would repair the entire damage", said the director of the Port of Bar, Ilija Pješcic.
The damage will be repaired with financial assistance from the state, as well as World Bank funds.
"The government, the well-known work team that has been created will propose that the budget for 2025 includes covering the cost of purchasing one crane, whether through just providing guarantees for taking a loan, or perhaps through the repayment of the entire loan, we will see. And the plan is to acquire the second one by re-leasing the funds available to us from the World Bank for sustainable and efficient transport through Montenegro", said Pješcic.
ODT Bar hired experts who assess whether someone is responsible for material damage and what the amount is.
"I have information that the expert has completed the expert examination and submitted the report to the ODT. "We asked ODT, as an interested party, because of insurance and everything else, and because of third parties who were damaged, there are a couple of damaged Monte Cargo wagons and some containers from the freight forwarder, to get a report and they refused us," he said.
An assessment of the material damage is awaited, and Pješcic says that they have no information about possible liability either.
"We provided all the information that the experts asked for, and three months have already passed since then, we don't have any information," pointed out the director of Luka.
And whether on July 2, 2024, the Port Authority of Bar, which receives weather data from the Institute for Hydrometeorology and Seismology of Montenegro, announced possible natural disasters, and hurricane winds, we asked the director of Port of Bar.
"On that day, the announcement was of a yellow meteo alarm, where the wind is about 40 km per hour, the precipitation is of moderate intensity, and the Port operates fully regularly in such situations. No one could have imagined that it would come to what it did," he said.
In the first half of the year, the Port of Bar made a profit of about 700 thousand euros, and the transshipment was higher than in the comparative period of 2023. Despite its smaller capacity, it manages to fulfill all its obligations for the time being, Pješcic points out.
"We finish regularly, we don't have any, let's say, extraordinary losses on that side, everything is fine," he says.
On the northern coast of the Adriatic Sea, the Port of Bar has a lot of competition. In front of our largest port, the ports of Rijeka, Kopar and Ploce have long been there. Neighboring Albania is also investing huge funds in a new commercial port near Durrës.
"Now imagine that next to the port, at least 80 km from here, there is a port worth a billion euros," he says.
Montenegro must invest significant funds in the port, railway and road infrastructure as soon as possible, otherwise, in the long term, the Port of Bar has no chance to compete with the competition in the immediate vicinity, Pješcic believes.
"You have a two-hour drive between Bijelo Polje and Podgorica, where only one train can go because of the transformer and restrictions, because someone didn't think to invest 3-4 million euros for a new transformer, so that two trains could draw a stable power supply, could move. It needs investment, a significant investment in the railway, it also needs investment in the Port. I'm afraid that we have another decade left, if we don't use it in a smart way, we will have to think about repurposing the port, and that's a real shame because it has huge potential", said Pješcic.
Ilija Pješcic says that the prerequisite for valorizing all the potentials of the Port of Bar and attracting cargo from surrounding countries, along with investing in infrastructure, is to return the former container terminals to state ownership. He is of the opinion that then, in the short term, the unique Port of Bar could increase its annual income four times.