The first of 10 ship-to-shore cranes at APM Terminals’ Port of Los Angeles facility has been raised 33 feet (10 meters) at Pier 400, making it the tallest port crane in North America, the terminal operator said Sept. 14.
The crane is expected to be ready for vessel operations in the next few months, according to APM.
The Los Angeles crane extension project is a $40 million investment, according to APM Terminals CEO Kim Fejfer. The project is designed to prepare for regular Ultra-Large Container Vessel (ULCV) calls in the trans-Pacific trade lanes, carrying up to 20,000 TEUs per vessel. Prior to the upgrade, the largest ships that could be served were vessels carrying an average of 13,000 TEUs.
APM Terminals Pier 400 Los Angeles operates a total of 14 STS cranes. The 10 retro-fitted cranes will enable handling vessels that have a beam of 23-containers wide, and stacked ten containers high above deck.
An additional feature of the upgraded cranes is the installation of light-emitting diode (LED) illumination to improve operator visibility and accuracy of the cranes’ optical character recognition (OCR) programs. The cranes are expected to use 60 percent less energy than conventional lighting systems.
The 484-acre APM Terminals Pier 400 Los Angeles terminal, which opened in 2002, is one of the largest proprietary terminals in the world. Its throughput was 2.48 million TEUs last year, about 16 percent of the Los Angeles-Long Beach port complex’s combined 2015 throughput of 15.3 million TEUs.
A time-lapsed video of the crane being raised at APM Terminals Pier 400 Los Angeles can be seen at https://youtu.be/V1gciMbYHjc
