Following the Canadian government's introduction in 2003 of the Marine Transportation Security Act, Canadian ports have taken steps to achieve compliance while seeking to minimize adverse impacts on port operations. For the Port of Trois-Rivières, in Québec on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River between Montréal and Québec City, this ultimately has meant redrawing of the port's perimeter.
The Port of Trois-Rivières, which mainly handles intermodal moves of solid and liquid bulk and general cargo, relies on fluidity of handling operations and interface between maritime, road and rail transport modes.
The port's proximity to downtown poses challenges in that the port, which was at the center of the city's creation, has seen its perimeter become inhabited, occupied by industrial, commercial and residential activities. Indeed, it became difficult to identify where the port ends and the city begins.
Upon advent of the MTSA, the simplest way to control access to ships would have been to control access to the entire port, but the port's proximity to the city made it unworkable to implement this solution. It would have been impossible to put up a fence along the port's boundaries without getting too close to the railway tracks leading to terminals and without impeding traffic flow at the port's six existing entranceways.
Finding it impractical to control access to the port, the port's management, in 2003, settled for controlling access to the docks by setting up fences and gatehouses between hangars located in the southern part of the port's facilities. While this approach met MTSA requirements, it resulted in the port being cut in half in an east-west direction, as shown by the red line in Figure 1. The space between this line and the docks is in the secure zone, while the area between this line and the port's boundary is outside the secure zone and cannot be fully used for storage and modal transfer. Thus, the port lost a major part of its capacity and had to increase access control at gatehouses.
In May 2008, the Trois-Rivières Port Authority made public its modernization plan, the first phase of which is aiming to correct this situation by the end of 2010. To do this, the authority initiated land acquisitions and reached agreement with the City of Trois-Rivières to get exclusive right to use of part of Notre-Dame-Centre Street. The port's perimeter will thus be properly delineated, as shown in Figure 2, and, instead of control being restricted to the docks, it will cover the entire port area.
This will allow the port to remove existing gatehouses and make full use of capacity, while truck traffic on local roads will also be alleviated, as the new perimeter will compel a transfer to the main gate of heavy traffic that now goes through downtown to reach the port. The goal is to reduce the impact of port activities on the local community within the perspective of the port's sustainable development.
"While the introduction of the Marine Transportation Security Act did, at first, create operational constraints at the Port of Trois-Rivières that impeded full use of its capacity," noted Gaétan Boivin, the port authority's president and chief executive officer, "it led to a reassessment and the implementation of steps which in the long run will be beneficial to the development of the port."
