SAVANNAH: The largest cargo ship ever to visit ports on the U.S. East Coast is so long the Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument could fit end-to-end along its deck and still leave room for Big Ben. The COSCO Development arrived Thursday at the Port of Savannah after cruising past dozens of onlookers who cheered and took photos of the mammoth vessel from Savannah’s downtown riverfront. Its first East Coast voyage marks a new era for U.S. ports that, despite years spent anticipating the supersized ships, will struggle to accommodate them without major infrastructure improvements. “It takes up the whole river!” Andrew Evans, who served as a ship’s officer in the 1960s, exclaimed to his wife as the ship slowly lumbered into view, the cargo containers stacked on its deck towering above trees on the shore. “The largest ships I was on, you could fit 10 of them on that ship,” Evans said. “Maybe more.”
At 1,200 feet bow-to-stern, the COSCO Development is longer than the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford. It can carry 13,000 cargo containers measuring 20 feet long apiece. That’s 30 percent more capacity than the last record-breaking ship that sailed into Savannah last summer. The big ship, flagged out of Hong Kong and owned by China-based COSCO Shipping Lines, is also the largest to pass through the Panama Canal following a major expansion last year. Its arrival on the East Coast shows shippers aren’t waiting for the seaports scrambling to deepen their harbors so the larger ships can pass fully loaded at low tide.
The Port of Virginia, where the ship docked earlier this week, is one of only four East Coast ports with the desired 50 feet of depth at low tide. A $973 million deepening of Savannah’s shipping channel started in 2015 but won’t be finished for about five more years. The Port of Charleston, S.C., where the big ship will head next before returning to Hong Kong, plans to start its own dredging this fall. Port Houston doesn’t have the channel depth to handle the ship. Overall, 15 U.S. seaports on the East and Gulf coasts are seeking $4.6 billion after being authorized by Congress to make room for bigger ships. Only three of those have cleared the permit requirements needed to start digging, said Jim Walker of the American Association of Port Authorities.
