WASHINGTON: Less than a month after welcoming the largest container ship to visit the East Coast, the Port of Charleston is ready for an even bigger visitor. The OOCL France, capable of carrying up to 13,926 cargo containers, made its way through the Panama Canal this week on its way to East Coast ports, including a scheduled June 3 stop at the Wando Welch Terminal. It’s still too early in the voyage to tell how many containers will be moved on and off the France when it’s docked in Mount Pleasant or how many cargo boxes the vessel will carry when it leaves the Port of Charleston for its home port in Hong Kong, said Erin Dhand, spokeswoman for the State Ports Authority.
At full capacity, the France can carry about 830 more cargo boxes than the COSCO Development, which currently holds the record — albeit short-lived — for largest container ship to call on East Coast ports. The 1,202-foot-long France is owned by Orient Overseas Container Line and is part of the Ocean Alliance’s weekly South Atlantic Express service between Asia and the United States. It is scheduled to stop at the Port of Virginia on Tuesday before heading to Savannah on Friday and then to the Port of Charleston. That was the same route the COSCO ship took.
When it passed through the Panama Canal on Wednesday, the France eclipsed the Development as the largest vessel to make its way through the waterway that was expanded last year to accommodate big container ships known as neo-Panamax vessels. “This trend towards the transit of 13,000 (container) or greater vessels demonstrates the acceptance and trust that the shipping industry has with the service provided by the expanded Canal,” Jorge Quijano, chief executive of the Panama Canal Authority, said in a statement. To date, nearly 600 neo-Panamax container ships have passed through the expanded canal, along with more than 500 petroleum and natural gas carriers that wouldn’t have fit through the canal before its June 2016 expansion.
The SPA is spending more than $1.5 billion on infrastructure improvements to keep the big ships coming to Charleston. That includes a $530 million project to deepen Charleston Harbor to 52 feet, giving the port the deepest navigation channel on the East Coast and allowing neo-Panamax vessels to visit without tide restrictions. With federal dollars set aside for the project this week, dredging will begin later this year and should wrap up in 2019 when a new container terminal opens on the former Navy Base in North Charleston.
