A container terminal at capacity. Kingston's ports are expanding fast, but the paperwork and forecasting behind the boxes have not kept pace. Photo via Unsplash.
TL;DR: Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica as a Category 5 storm on 28 October 2025. Six months later, in April 2026, consolidated containers that landed in February were still sitting uncleared at Kingston and Montego Bay, according to Port Authority of Jamaica President Professor Gordon Shirley. Meanwhile, Kingston Freeport Terminal is nine months into an US$80 million Westlands Expansion Project, cargo volumes there are already up 58% since 2016, and the terminal is adding an automated gate, new cranes, and 600,000-plus TEU of extra capacity. None of that capital forecasts a backlog before it happens. The 2026 pile-up was driven by expired duty-waiver paperwork, storm-damaged warehouses, and a holiday-plus-relief cargo surge nobody modelled in advance, exactly the kind of problem a predictive system already handles at ports like Rotterdam.
In April 2026, six months after Hurricane Melissa put Jamaica's biggest port to the test, a shipment that landed in February was still sitting in a Montego Bay warehouse, waiting for someone to collect it. Port Authority of Jamaica President Professor Gordon Shirley confirmed the backlog to the Jamaica Observer: consolidated containers, mostly pallets and barrels rather than full container loads, remained uncleared months after arrival, and one warehouse building had been damaged so badly it needed complete replacement. That is the container story running underneath Jamaica's port boom, and it is a different story from the one told in the press releases about new cranes.
Six months after Hurricane Melissa struck Jamaica in October 2025, consolidated containers that landed at Kingston and Montego Bay in February 2026 were still sitting uncleared as of that April, per the Port Authority of Jamaica. At the same time, Kingston Freeport Terminal's US$80 million Westlands Expansion buys cranes, gates, and storage, none of it built to forecast a pile-up like this before it happens.
A Boom Built on Steel
On paper, 2026 looks like the best year Jamaica's port sector has ever had. On 10 July 2025, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness stood at Kingston Freeport Terminal (KFTL) alongside Port Authority of Jamaica (PAJ) Chairman Alok Jain, PAJ President and CEO Professor Gordon Shirley, CMA Terminals Holding Senior Vice President Emmanuel Delachambre, and KFTL CEO Captain Jedrzej Mierzewski to sign the Westlands Expansion Project. Phase one alone is worth US$80 million: 15 hectares of new terminal land, a modern automated domestic cargo gate, new ship-to-shore cranes, and 14 hybrid straddle carriers. Storage capacity rises by more than 25%, adding at least 600,000 TEU of throughput. Soil movement for the project, according to the Jamaica Observer, was enough to fill the National Stadium.
The investment is chasing real demand. Cargo volumes through KFTL grew 58% between 2016 and 2025, and Lloyd's List ranked Kingston among the ten fastest-growing container ports on earth in 2023. "By reducing vessel waiting times and increasing cargo throughput, we are positioning Jamaica to capture a greater share of global shipping activity," Holness said at the signing. Professor Shirley put it more bluntly: the expansion will let Kingston "accommodate cargo that is currently bypassing the port." Across the harbour, Kingston Wharves Limited posted an 18% jump in first-quarter 2026 revenue to J$3.33 billion and has set a 2030 target of J$20 billion, backed by a technology and innovation award from the Organization of American States and the Association of American Port Authorities.
The Backlog Nobody Forecast
None of that steel prevented what happened after Hurricane Melissa made landfall near Black River, St Elizabeth, on 28 October 2025 as a Category 5 storm. By January 2026, weeks after the holiday shipping season, Shipping Association of Jamaica (SAJ) President Corah Ann Robertson-Sylvester was publicly urging cargo owners to come collect their goods, warning that "the longer stripped cargo remains uncollected, the bigger the problem becomes." Expired Unaccompanied Baggage Allowance documents, known locally as "yellow forms," were a major blocker: barrels sat at the dock because the paperwork behind them had lapsed, not because the goods themselves were in dispute.
Three months on from that warning, the backlog had not cleared. Professor Shirley told the Observer in April 2026 that a surge of diaspora relief cargo, arriving on top of the normal Christmas peak, had overwhelmed both the physical space and the processing capacity at Kingston and Montego Bay at the same time. Some importers, confused by shifting government duty-waiver rules for hurricane relief goods, simply abandoned their barrels rather than sort out the paperwork. The PAJ's response was entirely reactive: extended warehouse hours, waived storage fees and duties, negotiated demurrage discounts with shipping lines, and consideration of moving overflow goods to the King's Warehouse in Kingston. Every one of those measures treats a symptom that had already been building for months.
Gantry cranes and container rows at a working port. The equipment moves boxes fast; nothing in Jamaica's current port investment predicts which boxes are about to become a problem. Photo via Unsplash.
A Trucker's View From the Kingston Waterfront
A haulage driver who has worked the Kingston waterfront for over a decade, speaking to a local trade outlet earlier this year, summed up the mismatch better than any press release: "Dem a buy crane and gate fi move box fast, but nobody a tell we weeks ahead seh a hundred extra barrel a come and no space nuh deh fi dem. By the time wi si the pile-up, it too late." The gate moves a truck through faster once it arrives. Nothing in the new investment tells anyone a truck is coming three weeks before it does.
The Playbook Already Running Elsewhere
The gap is not that predictive systems for ports are experimental or unproven. The Port of Rotterdam, Europe's largest container port, runs a platform called Nextlogic that ingests roughly 40,000 data inputs a day from more than 20 shipping, terminal, and customs parties, replans continuously, and has cut inland vessel time in port by more than 20%, according to the Port of Rotterdam Authority. The Port of Los Angeles built its Port Optimizer control tower with Wabtec specifically to give shippers a real-time view of truck turn times and container dwell across all twelve San Pedro Bay terminals, turning a problem that used to surface only after trucks were already backed up into one visible days in advance.
Neither system exists in any form at Kingston or Montego Bay. The Westlands Expansion buys an automated gate that processes a truck faster once it arrives. It does not predict, three weeks out, that a wave of relief barrels plus the usual Christmas surge is about to exceed available warehouse space, and it does not flag a shipment with an expiring duty-waiver document before that shipment sits at the dock accruing demurrage. That is not a hardware problem. It is a data problem, and Jamaica's port operators already generate the data, manifests, customs filings, warehouse occupancy, historical dwell times, that a forecasting model would need. Nobody has yet built the model.
The Caucedo Race
The timing matters because Kingston is not competing only against its own congestion. Caucedo in the Dominican Republic has spent years positioning itself as the Caribbean's alternative transshipment hub, and the contest between the two ports has sharpened as the Panama Canal recovers unevenly from its 2023 to 2024 drought. Daily transit slots through the canal in 2026 remain below the pre-drought range of 36 to 38, even with lake levels restored, which keeps carriers looking for Caribbean alternatives that can absorb rerouted cargo reliably. A port that cannot clear its own backlog inside six months is a harder sell to a shipping line comparing Kingston against Caucedo on reliability, whatever the capacity numbers say on a slide deck.
To be fair to the PAJ, none of this year's congestion was caused by a normal planning failure. A Category 5 hurricane, a holiday peak, and an unprecedented relief cargo surge landed on the port at the same time, and the SAJ's Terrence Brooks has pointed to genuine investment in hybrid straddle carriers, super post-Panamax cranes, and digital upgrades as evidence the sector is serious about modernizing. The honest criticism is narrower than "the port failed." It is that a sector spending US$80 million on physical capacity, in a year it already knew carried hurricane risk, did not spend a fraction of that on the forecasting layer that would have told the PAJ in December, not April, how bad the barrel backlog was about to get.
Why Nobody Has Built It Yet
Part of the answer is organizational. The PAJ, KFTL, SAJ, and customs authorities are separate bodies with separate systems, and Rotterdam's Nextlogic only works because more than 20 parties agreed to feed one shared platform, a coordination problem as much as a technical one. Part of it is that the current capital cycle, like Jamaica's bauxite investment wave covered elsewhere on this site, was decided and largely funded before Melissa made landfall, so it was never built around a hurricane-plus-holiday shock scenario in the first place. And part of it is plain sequencing: rebuilding a damaged warehouse in Montego Bay understandably comes before commissioning a forecasting system nobody has asked for yet.
None of that makes the backlog acceptable, only explicable. A US$80 million capital programme is exactly the moment to fund the data layer alongside the concrete, not after the next hurricane season exposes the same gap again.
What Vision 2030 Actually Requires Here
Jamaica's Vision 2030 plan talks about a knowledge-driven, logistics-hub economy, and the port sector is where that language gets tested against a real supply chain rather than a policy paper. This is where StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded in Jamaica by Adrian Dunkley, the region's recognised AI leader, fits into the picture. The pattern here is the one StarApple AI Jamaica's research keeps finding across sectors that already have the money and the motive: the capital gets spent on visible, physical capacity because that is what a ribbon-cutting looks like, while the quieter forecasting layer that would prevent the next crisis gets left for the next budget cycle. Shipping is a harder sector to fix than most, because it depends on customs, private terminal operators, and shipping lines all sharing data, but it is also a sector with an obvious, recent, well-documented failure to learn from.
A realistic first step does not require rebuilding Rotterdam's system in Kingston. It means the PAJ, KFTL, and SAJ agreeing to share manifest, dwell-time, and duty-waiver status data into one model that flags at-risk cargo two to three weeks before it lands, the same lead time Jamaica already gets on a hurricane forecast. Add computer-vision-based yard occupancy tracking, cheap relative to a US$80 million capital programme, so warehouse managers know they are approaching capacity before trucks start queuing outside the gate. Neither project needs Alpart-scale capital or a three-year procurement cycle. Both need a decision to build them.
The Bottom Line
Kingston's port sector did something genuinely difficult in 2026: it kept cargo moving through a Category 5 hurricane, a holiday peak, and a relief surge, all while pouring US$80 million into new cranes, gates, and storage. That is real progress, and it should be credited as such. But six months is a long time for a barrel of hurricane relief goods to sit in a warehouse, and every one of those months added demurrage costs, strained tourism and retail supply chains, and pushed Kingston's reliability case against Caucedo in the wrong direction. The next capital cycle should buy the forecast, not just the crane.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are containers still stuck at Jamaica's ports six months after Hurricane Melissa?
How much is Jamaica investing in the Westlands Expansion Project at Kingston Freeport Terminal?
How much has cargo volume grown at Kingston's port?
What caused the port congestion that persisted into 2026?
Is Jamaica's port investment using AI or automation?
What could AI actually do to prevent the next backlog?
How does Kingston compete with other Caribbean ports?
Is StarApple AI Jamaica working with the shipping and logistics sector?
A bulk cargo vessel at dock. Kingston and Montego Bay both handle vessels like this daily, and the paperwork trailing each one is where the next backlog will start. Photo via Unsplash.