"At present, the line of queues has been reduced to about six kilometers only from about nine kilometers last night," Mario Oetomo Sardadi, the head of the public relations of Inland Waterway Service (ASDP) for Merak, said here on Sunday.
He said his side has predicted the queue problem at the port would have been overcome Sunday night and the bad weather at Sunda Strait would be returning to normal.
Apart from that the ASDP has also been operating 26 ferries to help overcome the port congestion, he said.
Mario Oetomo said on Saturday that the ASDP was deploying 25 roll-on-roll-off (Roro) ferries to handle long queues of vehicles at the Merak ferry port caused by bad weather at the Sunda Strait.
"We hope that with the addition of 8 Roro ships to the previous 17 ships, the long queues of trucks will be shortened," Mario Oetomo Sardadi, ASDP Public Relations Chief for Merak Branch, said here on Saturday.
He noted that as a company catering to people who want to cross the Sunda Strait from Java to Sumatra or vice versa, the ASDP would remain committed to providing the best service to its customers.
Mario said his company gave priority to the safety of passengers and the smoothness of their trips with on-time departure and arrival schedules.
Therefore, he remarked, his company was operating a total of 25 ferries to help overcome the problem of long queues of trucks at the port.
It was predicted that the number of vehicles crossing the Sunda Strait through the port during the weekend would total 93,500. "Now the number of passengers at the port is increasing because of the weekend," he added.
On Thursday, bad weather on the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra resulted in a two-kilometer queue of thousands of trucks and private cars on the road leading to the port of Merak.
The ferry transport between Merak and Bakauheni in Lampung, on the southern tip of Sumatra, was hindered by the angry sea and strong winds, Mario said.
"ASDP Merak has to temporarily close two quays because of bad weather in the Sunda Strait, with waves rising as high as four meters," Mario stated.
ASDP operates only 17 units of large-capacity Roro ships, which serve the route between Merak and Bakauheni, he emphasised.
"As a result, many vehicles, mostly trucks, have to queue and wait for their turn to board the vessels," he explained.
The number of ships will soon be increased if conditions allow it, he added.
The situation has been bad since Wednesday night, he said. "We have been here for over five hours," a truck driver stated.
Besides this, floods have damaged some of the vehicles. Floods affected the Tangerang-Merak toll road at Km 57-58, but they had subsided by Friday.
The flood began to subside after the toll road was closed, Indah Permanasari, a spokesman for the toll service, noted.
The toll road has been closed since Wednesday, 11:43 p.m. local time, because of the flood, which was triggered when Ciujung River overflowed its banks.
(A014)
Editor: Jafar M Sidik
Copyright © ANTARA 2013
