Port Of Long Beach At Forefront Of Technology With Its Super-Sized Cranes
Posted Saturday May 14, 2011 – 11:10am
The port of Long Beach is using super-sized cranes for a new breed of container ship that could shake up port competition worldwide when a wider Panama Canal opens in 2014, it was reported today.
The latest gantry cranes stand about 15 stories tall are operated by a joystick from a perch about 140 feet in the air. Their reach is about 210 feet, meant to service ships that are 22 shipping containers wide, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The cranes were built in 2005 at a cost of about $11 million each, when ships 22-containers wide were among the largest, but the industry is now moving toward even larger ships, commonly referred to as post-Panamax ships.
“This is an industry that is constantly moving toward bigger and better and faster. So, we just moved ahead with where we thought the industry was headed,” Charles Doucette, the port’s general manager, told The Times.
And when the expanded canal opens, West Coast ports will have to compete for ships that were too big to squeeze through the canal but soon will be able to transit into the Caribbean and call ports in the Gulf of Mexico and on the East Coast.
The Los Angeles-Long Beach complex is the nation’s busiest, but that could change if shipping firms reroute ships carrying imports from Asia through the canal.
About half of the cranes at the port of Long Beach are now capable of unloading ships up to 22-containers wide.
“We’ll run them 16 hours a day on two shifts, five cranes to a ship,” Doucette told the newspaper.
The port of Long Beach is building a $1 billion container terminal known as the Middle Harbor project.
At some East Coast ports, dredging operations are under way where operators are hoping to bring in new business with the advent of bigger, wider and deeper-draft ships.