Post #42986 by martiki on Mon, Jul 14, 2003 4:21 PM

On 2003-07-13 01:47, cynfulcynner wrote:

On 2003-07-12 19:12, martiki6 wrote:
Well, it's like this: Here's a picture of a modern container ship- biggest one on the water right now in fact:

Click here to see the image

I knew you'd know this stuff! 8)

Could this ship dock in Oakland, or are the channels too shallow? Could it fit in the Panama Canal?

--cindy

Sorry about the uber-jpeg, Hanford. I thought it was dramatic.

Well, that ship (the OOCL Shenzen) won't fit in Oakland just yet. All those new cranes that you've seen coming in under the Golden Gate are designed for ships just like that. That is, they can reach across the width of the ship. The Shenzen is 17 or 18 containers wide. So that part is OK. But Oakland isn't deep enough to handle these ships yet. They require a port about 50 feet deep. Oakland is around 40. So they do fit at the Port of Long Beach/Los Angleles. Oakland is preparing to dredge to meet the requirement, but it's a sticky situation environmentally. The Port really has to do it to remain competitive and keep the price on imported goods down. (i.e. so you don't have to truck things up from LA). The problem is that the Port of Oakland sits on an old military base, and a lot of the extremely nasty chemicals they once used are in the seabed. Dredging might release them back into the bay. Ironically, using these giant ships is better for the environment because they are more fuel effecient and you just need fewer on the water.

The Shenzen is just over 8000TEU, which means it can carry over 8000 twenty foot containers. Serious business. That's about 160,000,000 pounds of cargo.

These ships and the giant cranes that load them are called "Post-Panamax", meaning they are (way) too big for the Panama Canal. The largest that go through the canal are about 4600TEU, and those call Oakland all the time. Here's some cool pix of them going through one of the locks in the canal. There are literally inches on each side.

Pretty neat stuff.