On Friday, the Port of Savannah announced it had received four Super Post-Panamax ship-to-shore cranes, upgrading its crane fleet to 34 machines.
Four older cranes were retired and recycled, port officials said, to make room for the four new cranes. The machines will serve the largest vessels on the U.S. East Coast. The cranes are part of the Georgia Port Authority’s $1.9 billion infrastructure improvement plan.
“Along with the completion of our project to improve Berth 1, these cranes will help deliver faster turn times to our ocean carrier customers, including the largest vessels calling on the U.S. East Coast,” Griff Lynch, GPA president and CEO, said. “No other terminal in the nation can bring more cranes to bear, or match the efficiency, productivity and global connectivity of the Port of Savannah.”
Two of the cranes are 295 feet tall, and the other two are 306 feet tall, officials said. The cranes will have a reach of 22 and 24 containers wide, respectively. The taller cranes will be offloaded at Berth 1 at the Garden City Terminal, and the others will be installed upriver at Berth 9. Officials said ship-to-shore cranes are the workhorses of container port operations.
GPA said it had previously received a batch of four cranes in February to work the renovated Berth 1, and now allows the berth to serve vessels with a capacity of 16,000 20-foot equivalent container units, increasing the berth’s productivity by 25 percent, or 1.5 million TEUs of annual capacity.
“The ratio of GPA’s economic impact equates to roughly one job per nine TEUs moved,” Stacy Watson, director of economic and industrial development at GPA, said. “By expanding our annual capacity by 3 million TEUs over the next three years, GPA is also increasing its job-supporting capability by more than 300,000 jobs for Georgians.”