The Port of Virginia anticipates continued heavy volumes at Virginia International Gateway (VIG) throughout this week (March 16-20).  Through the weekend, port operations continued taking action to mitigate the congestion by using barges to reposition containers between Portsmouth Marine Terminal (PMT), Norfolk International Terminals (NIT) and VIG. Usage of the barge minimizes impact at the gate.  The port is taking the following action:  • Optimizing vessel arrivals at VIG to control inventory and better balance resource demand  • The port will maintain its Saturday gate hours at VIG, NIT and PPCY through Saturday, June 27; PMT will have Saturday gates on March 28  • The port will maintain Sunday gate hours at VIG and the PPCY through Sunday, April 26, at which point the need will be re-evaluated  • At VIG, the operations team is grounding select containers outside RMG stacks to reduce density in the stacks  • The port is encouraging logistics and dray companies and cargo owners with containers at NIT to direct motor carriers to that terminal, if possible  On March 13, the port announced these measures: • The shift of two vessel services, ZIM’s ZCP and Maersk’s SAE to PMT from VIG: On Saturday, March 21, the ZIM Haifa will call PMT and on Saturday, March 28, the terminal will receive the Maersk Varamo. The terminal is open to receive exports for those services  • Begin receipt of 400, 40-foot chassis that will be integrated into HRCPII during the next five weeks. Once here, the units will undergo an inspection and immediately be placed into service. The port will continue to add more assets to its chassis fleet in the coming months  • In order to further increase chassis supply, the port is implementing a program to recover chassis from its terminals. When and where possible, operations team members will be grounding empty containers on wheels to better utilize the chassis. In this port-wide effort, the first area of focus will be those damaged empty containers that are mounted on a chassis, but can be grounded without interruption of service / repairs  • The port began using an inter-terminal barge to reduce drayage between the terminals and stack density at VIG and NIT  On March 12, the port announced these measures:  • Implementation of a policy to reduce the number of days an export container can dwell on all terminals to 9 from 10  • For ocean carriers, an extension free-time for all containers at VIG by two days  • Sunday gate hours at VIG and PPCY  • In order to reduce stack density at VIG, we will begin using barge service to move containers to PMT  On March 11, the port announced these measures:  • Extended evening gate hours until 9 p.m., March 11-13 (EXPIRED)  • Keeping empty container moves out of the gates at both VIG and Norfolk International Terminals (NIT)  • A project to segregate rail and truck cargo at VIG • Requesting that ocean carriers evacuate as much of their cargo from the terminals as possible  • Using the 64 Express barge service to move containers between VIG and NIT in order to keep that dray traffic out of the gate