The cranes, which will be erected at the Port Newark Container Terminal on Newark Bay, will help usher shipping’s “super post-Panamax” era into the region, allowing the world’s largest cargo ships to unload thousands of containers shipped directly to the East Coast from Asia following completion of a Panama Canal expansion next year.
Port Newark Container Terminal’s acquisition of the cranes for $40 million from Shanghai-based ZMPC is one of several public and private investments to ready the New York-New Jersey port region for the world’s biggest container ships, which have the capacity to carry 7,000 40-foot shipping containers at a time.
The cranes are just a part of a $500 million ongoing expansion by PNCT of its 260-acre terminal on Newark Bay. Other efforts have included a multi-year deepening of the channels in New York Harbor and a $1.3 billion project by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to raise the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge, which will allow the ships to pass below en route to PNCT and other terminals on the Newark and Elizabeth waterfronts.
Another terminal in the port, Global Container Terminal — which straddles the Jersey City-Bayonne waterfront — is now developing the port’s first automated terminal, which will be able to load and unload ships faster.
Some environmentalists and community activists in neighborhoods around the port fear that the larger ships will mean increased port truck traffic and more pollution. But shipping industry leaders say the ships are more efficient due to economy of scale as well as enhanced fuel economy that will lower costs and emissions.
“It makes us a more efficient port, all of these things connected,” PNCT President Jim Pelliccio said in an interview ahead of the cranes’ arrival, referring to them and other port projects.
When erected with their arms extended upward, the orange cranes will stand 561 feet tall, six-feet higher than the signature obelisk in Washington, D.C. In addition to being able to load and unload higher stacks of containers, their longer arms will allow them to extend farther across the decks of big ships, with a capacity to unload 22 rows of containers, from PNCT cranes’ current maximum of 18.
The arrival of the bright orange cranes on the similarly hued freighter Zhen Hua – whose special low deck looked perilously close to the waterline – was a novel sight for several dozen onlookers at Mayor Dennis P. Collins Park in Bayonne today.
“It’s humongous,” Joe Passantino, of Bayonne, said of the floating spectacle as it eked under the Bayonne Bridge. “It almost looks like it won’t fit, but of course it does.”
“We’re going to need them going forward,” Passantino said. “It’s a sign of the future.”
