Port's Dredging Project Will Make Room for Larger Cargo Ships
The Port of Los Angeles, after taking a five-year break, has resumed the final phase of its $370 million dredging project to allow more super-sized container ships to call at the busiest port in the nation.
The final phase of the Main Channel Deepening Project should be completed by 2013 and will take channels that are 40 to 43 feet deep and make them 53 feet deep, said Arley Baker, the port’s senior director of communications.
The final phase, which will cost $93 million, is vital to compete with the Panama Canal’s major expansion project, which will allow larger cargo-container ships carrying more than 5,000 20-foot containers to navigate the canal’s locks by 2014.
“This project will complete something we started planning in the late 1990s and should suffice for decades ahead,” Baker said.
The project stalled when port officials had to find additional sites to place dredged-up material taken from the bottom of the channels. That required an additional environmental-impact report to approve placing the more-toxic soils into a rock dike at the shuttered Southwest Marine shipbuilding yard, located nearby on Terminal Island. Clean materials will be dumped in the outer shallow-water habitat, expanding it by an additional 50 acres.
The dredging project, which will allow container ships carrying as many as 10,000 containers to dock, will complete channel deepening in the waters leading to the Yusen/NYK, Evergreen and Yang Ming container terminals and is key to completing expansion of the China Shipping and TraPac container terminals.
Currently, cargo container ships carrying as many as 8,500 containers can call at Pier 400, an outer-harbor container terminal occupied by Maersk.—Deborah Belgum
