NEW YORK: A Chinese heavy-lift ship carrying four big container cranes is sailing toward Tacoma, a port city in Washington state, local authorities said this week.
The 47,107-ton heavy load carrier Zhen Hua 28, which is 232 meters long and carries the flag of China’s Hong Kong, is scheduled to arrive on Friday in the port of Tacoma, according to the latest announcement by the Northwest Seaport Alliance (NSA), the port authority based in the Puget Sound region that comprises the seaports of Tacoma and Seattle, the largest city in Washington.
The ship will sit at anchor in Commencement Bay for a day or two before delivering the cranes to Husky Terminal at the northwest end of the Blair Waterway, the NSA said.
The four cranes are part of the eight new super-post-Panamax cranes ordered by the NSA from Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co. Ltd (ZPMC), a Chinese multinational engineering company and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of cranes and large steel structures.
The NSA said the other four cranes will arrive in 2019 and will be installed at Husky Terminal, which is undergoing terminal improvements estimated at about 250 million U.S. dollars that began in September 2016 on Tacoma’s General Central Peninsula.
The new cranes will have an outreach of 24 containers and a lift height of over 50 meters above the pier deck.
The upgrading project will strengthen and realign a berth and add eight new super-post-Panamax cranes capable of serving two 18,000-TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) container ships at the same time.
Currently, no cranes are being manufactured in the United States and ZPMC delivers more than 200 cranes every year around the world, including many seaports in the United States.
