‘Total gridlock’ at Dover as 8,000 travellers face new EU border checks on busiest day of year so far
Hundreds of families leaving the UK for a bank holiday were trapped in gridlocked queues outside the Port of Dover as EU border checks were introduced.
Ferry passengers traveling to Europe face waits of at least an hour and a half at the port to clear border controls, the Port of Dover said in an update Saturday morning. However, holidaymakers reported that they waited another two hours to enter the port and that traffic on the surrounding roads was completely blocked.
Saturday is expected to be the port’s busiest day yet, with more than 8,000 passengers. Families will also have to endure May’s unusually high temperatures while waiting to board their ferries. Dover is expected to reach 25 degrees on Saturday, and a yellow heat alert is in effect for the Southeast.
This is the first holiday period since the introduction of the EU’s entry-exit system (EES), which involves recording people’s fingerprints and taking their photographs.
The entire system at the Port of Dover is not yet operational and is still waiting for French technology to be installed. As a result, French border police are manually creating traveler registrations at the eastern docks.
Rosamund Hall, who traveled to France with her partner Paul and her four-year-old son, said: Independent They said they had been trying to enter the port for more than two hours at around 8.30am on Saturday morning.
“All roads leading into Dover are completely blocked,” he said. “Traffic management control seems unable to control what is happening and it is very difficult to get information on what the processing time is like.
“I’m traveling in convoy to France with my mother, and they’re ahead of us. Once they get into the actual port area, they said it’s incredibly slow, too. You get into another log jam. They got into the port area around 6:50 in the morning, and they’ve just gone through passport control, so it takes almost an hour and 45 minutes, and that’s not even taking into account the massive traffic it takes to even get there.”
He said his car was about a mile from the harbor entrance but “the roads looked like parking lots, there was congestion, everything was static.”
Mrs. Hall, who writes about wine Independent, He described the situation as follows: “Traffic approaching from the M20, the two main roads entering the port area, and congestion traffic coming from the A2 entrance, are really heavy. Those trying to come via Dover and feed are being sent back to the main arteries.”
“We are traveling on P&0 ferries and were supposed to cross at 9am. They told us not to arrive more than two hours before check-in closing, so for my 9am ferry it will be 6am. We followed instructions aiming to arrive around 6:20am. It’s ridiculous that this is the case and it won’t get any better come summer.”
Simon Calder, Independent’s The Dover-based travel correspondent said: “Unfortunately if you are one of the 8,000 families heading abroad this morning and for the rest of the day who are taking the ferry to Calais or Dunkirk then you will have to wait.
“I look across and there are cars waiting down the A20 towards Dover. “I can see in front of me about a thousand cars that have been here since dawn.
“Normally they were hoping to process about 800 cars per hour, I don’t see that rate.”
