Cranes start at ten and stop at six. A night with the crews who unload a city while it sleeps.
At 21:50 the east docks are a car park with cranes. At 22:00 the floodlights come on, a horn sounds twice and four hundred people start work.
The port has unloaded at night since a noise agreement with the neighbouring district moved daytime traffic off the quay road. Almost everything the city eats, wears or builds with now comes ashore between ten and six.
The first hour
A crane driver with nineteen years on the quay climbs sixty metres of stairs to a cab the size of a wardrobe. From there she lifts one container every ninety seconds until her break at one.
"You stop seeing boxes," she said. "You see a queue. My job is to keep the queue moving and not think about what is in it."
Below her, the yard crews work in pairs with radios and hand signals that predate the radios.
What comes off
On the night we visited, the manifest for one ship listed:
- 212 containers of chilled fruit
- 90 of flat-packed furniture
- 41 of bicycle parts
- one, sealed and escorted, of museum pieces on loan
By 04:30 the fruit was on lorries. By 06:00 the ship was riding a metre higher in the water.
The trade-off
Night work pays a third more, and the port has no trouble filling it. The cost shows up elsewhere. The clinic by the gate treats more sleep problems than injuries, and the average career on the cranes is eleven years.
The noise agreement is reviewed next year. The district wants it kept. The crews are split, and say nobody has asked them yet.
The floodlights go off at 06:10. The car park fills again by seven.
