Largest Ship to Visit U.S. East Coast Arrives in Savannah (Mega Container Ship)

gCaptain ^ | 5/11/17 | gCaptain

[Rebelbase]

COSCO Development passes River Street in downtown Savannah, Georgia. Photo: Georgia Ports Authority/Stephen Morton Photography

The largest ship to ever visit the U.S. east coast arrived at the port of Savannah on Thursday after traveling through the expanded Panama Canal from Asia.

The COSCO Development entered the mouth of the Savannah River at about 7 a.m. Thursday morning, drawing large crowds of spectators as it made its way past Savannah’s downtown River Street and under the Talmadge Memorial Bridge before docking at the Garden City Terminal at around 11 a.m.

With 13,092 TEU capacity and measuring 366 meters long by 48.2 meters in beam, COSCO Development is the largest ship to ever visit the east coast of the United States. Earlier this month it also became the largest ship to transit the Panama Canal Expansion

[Rebelbase]

What a beast.

[C19fan]

As a comparison the Nimitz class CVN is 333 meters long.

[RightGeek]

[DIRTYSECRET]

Who cares?

[T-Bone Texan]

WTF is a TEU?

"The twenty-foot equivalent unit (often TEU or teu) is an inexact unit of cargo capacity often used to describe the capacity of container ships and container terminals."

It's crazy how many different size containers they have nowadays. That's why it's an inexact measurement, I guess.

[PAR35]

Weld on a flight deck and put in a couple of elevators, and you have a nice sized aircraft carrier.

[PAR35]

What isn’t mentioned is that this is intended as a warning to the west coast unions that were delaying the unloading of the Chinese ships a few months back.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

You could say the same about the half dozen 1,000 footers on the Great Lakes...

[Original Lurker]

Bet it’s a Hyundai.

[Last Dakotan]

All your jobs are belong to us.

But hey, now we're going to sell them more chickens - thanks Trump!

[Carthego delenda est]

It’s mind boggling to think about all the wonderful Chinese treasures the Cosco holds!

[Alberta's Child]

The vast majority of shipping containers come in 3-4 different lengths. For international shipping, 20-foot and 40-foot containers are typically used because it's easy to stack them in a modular fashion. The term "TEU" is used to measure the capacity of a container ship. This works well with the two standard sizes of international shipping containers: one forty-foot container is the same "size" as two twenty-foot containers.

Here in the U.S., containers that are transported only on trains and by truck are usually 53 feet long. This coincides with the maximum length of a trailer for a tractor-trailer combination on almost the entire U.S. interstate highway system.

You may also find some 48-foot containers out there. China tried using them in international shipping for a while, but it was just too unwieldy to stack them with 20-foot and 40-foot containers. So they are generally used as smaller versions of the 53-foot containers you see here in domestic U.S. shipping.

[Alberta's Child]

"The twenty-foot equivalent unit (often TEU or teu) is an inexact unit of cargo capacity often used to describe the capacity of container ships and container terminals."

One part of this statement isn't exactly correct. The TEU is used to measure the capacity of container ships as well as the cargo volume at a container terminal or port (i.e., "The Port of Savannah handled [X] TEUs in 2015"), but not the capacity of a container terminal. The capacity of a container terminal is dictated by a combination of factors, including ship loading/unloading rates, storage capacity on the pier and nearby container storage yards, gate capacity at the terminal gates, and the speed at which containers are picked up and dropped off by customers. Capacity is usually posted in terms of container lifts (one container lifted on or off a ship), and is measured in terms of lifts per acre for a unit of time. For example, the capacity of Terminal [X] at the Port of Long Beach might be measured as: "4,500 lifts per acre per year."

[mikey_hates_everything]

I’ll bet most of that is going right up 95 to the Harbor Freight warehouse in Dillon.

[llevrok]

Who cares?

West Coast ports and rail lines should.

Jumbo container ships from Asia could only port on the west coast as they did not fit the Canal (save for sailing around South America).

Now with the expansion, they will go directly to the East Coast, reducing west coast port business and the associated ground movements from there.

Ports like Seattle, Tacoma and Vancouver are very concerned.

And some container shippers are likewise concerned. There is a glut of traditional sized ships (They over built) and now these are being replaced by jumbo ships.

[GOPJ]

Interesting stuff - thanks for sharing.

[T-Bone Texan]

Thank you for the clarification.

I work at a marine/offshore class society and I write/edit class rules for vessels all day long - I should know this stuff!

[Alberta's Child]

I can tell you that some West Coast ports aren't concerned at all. The Port of LA/Long Beach, for example, now sees an occasional container ship (15,000-18,000 TEU capacity) that's too large even for the expanded Panama Canal.

There are a good reasons why most of these shipping lines continue to make their regular port calls on the West Coast even if their ships CAN fit through the Panama Canal. It's simply faster to get a container from northern Asia -- places like China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea -- to most of the U.S. (even most of the East Coast) through a West Coast port than to send it all the way down through the Panama Canal.

What's really driving a lot of the changes in global shipping patterns isn't the expansion of the Panama Canal. It's the growth of manufacturing in southern Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.), which makes the U.S. East Coast easier to reach via a westbound trip through the Suez Canal and across the Atlantic Ocean.

[Alberta's Child]

LOL. You’re welcome. I only know this because I’ve done a bit of work over the years on landside access and operations for port facilities. I had to learn a lot of this just so I could figure out how to estimate the landside impact of growth in port/marine operations.

[central_va]

Exporting jobs, importing cheap crap. Who wins? Globalist Corporate bottom lines and corrupt politicians.