From SCDigest’s On-Target e-Magazine Giant CMA CGM Ship Visits Port of Los Angeles, Heads to Oakland, but Major Systemic Changes Needed, Drewry Says Perhaps missed by many during the last week of 2015, the first of the latest generation of 18,000 TEU+ container ships made a visit to a North American port. France’s CMA CGM’s 1300-foot long Benjamin Franklin vessel was unloaded at the port of Los Angeles after arriving from loading stops on its maiden voyage from China and South Korea, before heading north to the port of Oakland from there. The Benjamin Franklin can handle about 18,000 TEU. Industry experts foresee five or six load centers developing at U.S. ports – two on the West Coast, one on the Gulf Coast, and two or three on the East Coast. Until now, that class of container ship (called ultra-large container vessels or ULCVs), which promises much lower cost per container than the previous generation of 12,000 to 13,000 TEU ships, had not been put in service into North American ports, being reserved primarily for Asia to European routes. Most North American ports are not deep enough to handle vessels of this size, and there have also been concerns about whether container handling productivity was strong enough in US terminals to unload these new giants effectively. In the first half of 2015, for example, the ports of LA and Long Beach were both hit with huge delays in container movements, the result in part from the effects of a labor slow down during contract negotiations with West Coast Longshoremen, but also due to the impact of even the previous generation of megaships that call there and which created major unloading challenges. The ports of both Los Angeles and Long Beach are in the midst of expensive projects to deepen […]