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Peter Stewart, PortandTerminal.com, February 5, 2018
Savannah, Georgia – At the Georgia Foreign Trade Conference, Georgia Ports Authority Executive Director Griff Lynch unveiled GPA’s Big Berth/Big Ship program that will allow the Port of Savannah to simultaneously handle six 14,000 TEU vessels by 2024.
“No other single container terminal in North America has the ability to expand berth capacity at this rate,”
Griff Lynch, Executive Director, Georgia Port Authority`
Currently, Savannah’s Garden City Terminal is equipped to handle two of these vessels and by April of this year, that number will increase to three.
Over the next five years, the Authority plans to add another 21 Neo-Panamax ship-to-shore cranes, replacing 14 of its older models to bring the total fleet to 37. Dock upgrades are already under way to support the new, larger machines.
In addition to the ship-to-shore cranes GPA is adding, a dozen new rubber-tired gantry cranes will bring the number Garden City Terminal’s container handling cranes to 158. Ten RTGs will be commissioned in July, another two in September. Phase I of the Mason Mega Rail project will be complete in October 2019.
Full completion a year later will double the Port of Savannah’s rail lift capacity to 1 million containers per year. In late 2021, the Savannah Harbor Expansion Project is slated for completion, delivering the deeper water necessary to better accommodate the larger vessels now calling on the U.S. East Coast.
Lynch also used the Georgia Foreign Trade Conference to announce that Georgia Ports had achieved its busiest month ever in January, moving 433,973 twenty-foot equivalent units, 28% more than the previous year.
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