Page 3
Fall 2016
NATURAL RESOURCES PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION
have forgotten, the Panama Canal,
which opened in 1914, is a system of
locks that shortens the shipping
route between the Atlantic and Pacif-
ic Oceans. Prior to construction of
the Canal, ships had a much longer
and dangerous route around the
southernmost reaches of South
America.
The Neo-Panamax ships can carry a
whopping 10,000 TEU’s (Twenty
Foot Equivalent Units) of cargo. A
TEU is the size of a standard ship-
ping container, 20 feet long by 8 feet
tall. Previously, most container ships
carried less than half that, about
4500 TEU’s. Think of the container
ships you usually see, and then im-
agine something more than twice as
big!
But the real whoppers will arrive
when work is completed on the new,
higher Bayonne Bridge. These mon-
sters will hold an unthinkable 14,000
TEU’s! That’s 14,000 trucks worth of
goods on a single ship.
Next time you are at the shoreline,
be on the lookout for the biggest
ships you have ever seen and think
about all of the work that was done
to bring them here.
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would actually happen. But If New
York didn’t spend billions to literally
reconfigure the landscape, these
ships would go to ports in California,
which already had greater capacity.
If that happened, it was feared that
there would be tremendous impacts
to New York’s economy.
As this started to unfold, your NRPA
board members attended many
meetings about what became known
as the Harbor Deepening Project.
We had many conversations about
the environmental impacts and the
property impacts when we learned
that rock at the bottom of shipping
channels around Staten Island would
need to be blasted away. There
were concerns that homes would be
damaged by the vibrations from the
underwater blasts. We were also
concerned about the disposal of
thousands of tons of both contami-
nated and relatively clean dredge
material, including clay that had last
been exposed when dinosaurs
roamed the earth. There were so
many meetings and so many points
of view. The Port Authority of New
York and New Jersey weighed in,
along with various shipping compa-
nies. We sat through discussions
about how consumer goods would
be transported once the containers
left the port area. There were con-
cerns about increased truck traffic in
New Jersey. The logistics and cost
of deepening miles of underwater
channels was truly mind boggling.
Well, the years have gone by, the
work was done and the future has
finally arrived. In the middle of July,
two gigantic Neo-Panamax ships
sailed under the Verrazano Bridge,
through the Kill Van Kull and into
Newark Bay. They are called “Neo-
Panamax” because even the Pana-
ma Canal had to have a new, super
wide lane constructed to fit these
enormous ships. For those of you
THE LARGEST CONTAINER
SHIPS EVER BUILT HAVE NOW
MADE THEIR WAY TO NEW YORK
HARBOR
By Ida Sanoff
There was a time when most of our
consumer goods were manufactured
right here in the United States. But
today, much of it is manufactured
overseas, especially in Asia. Cloth-
ing, electronics, home goods and
other items are packed into large
metal containers which are then
loaded onto container ships and
shipped halfway around the world
and into New York Harbor. You
have surely seen these ships navi-
gating under the Verrazano Bridge or
anchored in Upper New York Bay,
awaiting the high tide that will enable
them to sail into port.
Loading and unloading cargo used to
be done by hand and was a very
labor intensive, time consuming pro-
cess. It would often take a ship less
time to sail to a faraway destination
than it took to unload the cargo it
was carrying. But in the early 1960’s
someone figured out that if goods
were packed in standardized metal
containers, hundreds or even thou-
sands of them could be stacked on
the deck of a ship and quickly off-
loaded.
Then each container is
placed onto a truck or railway car
and driven to its final destination.
When containerized shipping be-
came the standard, New York City
was at a disadvantage because
large areas of land were needed to
accommodate the cranes and other
apparatus needed to load and un-
load containers. But New Jersey
had plenty of space and today, most
of the shipping facilities are located
in and around Newark Bay. This
area is referred to as the Port of New
York and New Jersey.
About fifteen years ago, Asian ship-
ping companies decided that bigger
was better and they started to talk
about a new category of freighter,
larger than any that had ever been
built before. But the shipping chan-
nels of New York Harbor were too
shallow for these massive vessels
and would have to be dredged and
deepened.
The Bayonne Bridge
would have to be raised higher too.
It was like the tail was wagging the
dog. It was difficult to imagine that
this was even doable, let alone that it
SEA TURTLES AT ENGLEWOOD
BEACH, FLORIDA
By Danny Ingellis
When my wife and I are vacationing
at our condo in Port Charlotte, Flori-
da, we frequent many of the beach-
es in the area. Our favorite beach is
Englewood Beach. It is clean, pris-
tine, has great facilities, loads of
seashells and plenty of wildlife such
as manatees, dolphins, birds galore
and fish aplenty, that is if you like
fishing (not my shtick).
Folks, my favorite reason for going
here are the Loggerhead Turtles that
come onto this beach in May-
October and dig nests to bury their
eggs. My only wish is to see this
happen. It only occurs at night to
prevent predators such as seagulls,
raccoons and wild dogs from digging
up the nest to eat the eggs.
As you can see from my photos,
there are markings on the sticks
near the nests. The top number is
the Zone; the next number is the
volunteer who witnessed the digging
of the nest and the bottom number is
CSCL Globe is the biggest container ship in
the world and it has a capacity of 19,000
TEUs and 400 meters in length.
