1 ship with 4 giant cranes will pass West Seattle on Friday

| Seen at sea | West Seattle news

(Photo courtesy Northwest Seaport Alliance)

This should be a sight at sea sometime Friday – a big ship carrying four of the biggest container cranes on the West Coast, headed to Tacoma. From the Northwest Seaport Alliance announcement:

Puget Sound Pilots are scheduled to board the Zhen Hua 28, a 761-foot-long heavy-lift ship, early Friday morning in Port Angeles and begin the journey to Tacoma. …

The ship will sit at anchor in Commencement Bay for a day or two before delivering the cranes to Husky Terminal at the northwest end of the Blair Waterway.

The Northwest Seaport Alliance ordered eight new super-post-Panamax cranes from Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co. Ltd (ZPMC) in China through a competitive bid process. No container cranes currently are manufactured in the U.S. ZPMC is the largest heavy-duty equipment manufacturer in the world and delivers more than 200 cranes every year around the world, including many seaports in the U.S. The other four cranes will arrive in 2019.

Find out more about the cranes in this NWSA video:

They’ll be 50 feet higher than the biggest ones in the area now, with “an outreach of 24 containers and a lift height of 165 feet above the pier deck.” The Tacoma terminal where they’ll be used is part of an ongoing overhaul project.

Question Authority February 21, 2018 (2:09 pm)

Wow, what a coincidence that the ship is made in China, the cranes are made in China and the products that they will offload will be made in China. What’s next, foreign investors buying into the Northwest real estate market, oh wait those are Chinese also.

WSB February 21, 2018 (2:34 pm)

The announcement notes that container cranes aren’t being made anywhere in the U.S. currently. I wouldn’t expect a China-made crane to come over in a U.S.-made ship but I’ve been looking around out of curiosity to see if there are any USA shipyards making heavy-lift ships … haven’t found one yet.

Scavenger Hunt February 21, 2018 (10:27 pm)

I often play this game with friends, family and coworkers when this discussion comes up.Look around your home and place of employment at everything and anything and see where it is made. Then we discuss how it got here, who handled it, how long has this been going on and will it or can it change?

Curious February 22, 2018 (9:32 am)

Forgive my naïveté but do those cranes come pre-assembled like that all the way across the ocean? I know these are coming now just from Pt. Angeles, but in what form did they get there? (Mentally marveling at the possibility of them coming on a ship like that all the way across the ocean…!)