A Shipping Company Paid $11 Million to Store Hurricane Relief Supplies That Are Now Worthless

• 40+ containers have sat at Jamaican ports since last year
• Dennis Shipping has paid over $11 million in port fees
• The cargo was Hurricane Melissa relief supplies
• Much of it is no longer of any value

Dennis Shipping Company, which serves the Jamaican diaspora in the United States, is pleading with port authorities to strip more than 40 containers that have sat at Jamaica’s two main ports since last year, carrying emergency hurricane relief supplies that are, by now, no longer of value. Despite receiving fixed time waivers on the free-storage period before taxes apply, the company had paid more than $11 million in fees as of last Thursday, a figure management said was still climbing.

Company boss Dennis Hawthorne wrote directly to Port Authority of Jamaica president and CEO Professor Gordon Shirley in a January 19 letter obtained by the Gleaner, respectfully requesting urgent assistance regarding the prolonged delays being experienced in the stripping of our containers. The letter’s ask was simple and specific: get the containers stripped before the accumulating storage fees erase whatever value the relief goods still carried.

The backlog behind Dennis Shipping’s specific problem is systemic rather than isolated. Shipping Association of Jamaica president Corah Ann Robertson-Sylvester described a holiday-season congestion spike that, unusually, had not eased by mid-January as it normally does: a surge of diaspora and international relief supplies arrived at the same time as peak holiday imports, an unprecedented combined volume, and when Montego Bay operations were disrupted, shippers diverted cargo to Kingston, pushing that port well beyond its normal capacity too. Port operators separately reported that their core commercial cargo, full container loads, lumber, steel, vehicles, kept moving at normal speed, the actual bottleneck sat specifically in bonded warehouses holding uncollected personal and relief shipments.

The Jamaica Customs Agency’s response by April was procedural rather than sympathetic to the underlying cause: importers were given until April 30 to clear cargo from Montego Bay warehouses, with anything left past the prescribed dwell time to be forcibly transferred to King’s Warehouse facilities in Kingston, and at risk of eventual auction. For relief cargo like Dennis Shipping’s, caught between a storm that created the surge and a customs deadline that treats aged, uncollected containers the same regardless of what they hold, the practical result was straightforward: paying real money to store goods that Hurricane Melissa itself had already made obsolete by the time anyone could actually clear them.

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