JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A ship capable of carrying 8,800, 22-foot containers set a record Friday as the largest container cargo ship ever to call on Jacksonville.
The MOL Northern Juvenile, which transited the Suez Canal from Asia before reaching the East Coast, loaded and offloaded cargo at the Jacksonville Port Authority's TraPac Container Terminal at Dames Point.
Although the ship moved a significant amount of cargo during its visit to Jacksonville and hundreds of workers participated in the operation, nearly 22,000 tons of inbound cargo and a similar amount of outbound cargo that would have loaded and unloaded in Jacksonville was forced to load/unload in another state because of the 40-foot depth of the St. Johns River shipping channel.
A federal project to increase the depth to 47 feet to accommodate new, larger container vessels fully loaded is in the design and engineering stage.
More than 1 million containers move through Jacksonville's public and private marine terminals annually, with more than 40 ocean carriers offering direct service to Europe, Africa, South America, the Caribbean and other key markets.
Florida is now the nation's third most populous state and more than 60 million U.S. consumers live within a one-day truck drive of Jacksonville's port. JaxPort terminals are serviced by three U.S. interstates (I-10, I-95 and I-75), and the city has 36 daily train departures via three railroads.
JaxPort has invested $600 million in recent infrastructure investments in everything from cranes to docks to rail and an authorized project to deepen the federal shipping channel.