Dredging to Bring Larger Vessels to JAXPORT

The MOL Northern Juvenile, capable of carrying 8,800 twenty-foot equivalent units (containers), set a record last week as the largest container cargo ship to ever call on Jacksonville.

The ship, which transited the Suez Canal from Asia before reaching the U.S. East Coast, loaded and offloaded cargo at JAXPORT’s TraPac Container Terminal at Dames Point.

Although the ship moved a significant amount of cargo during its visit to JAXPORT 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 been handled in Jacksonville was forced to load/unload in another state due to the 40 foot depth of the St. Johns River shipping channel.

A federal project to increase the depth to 47 feet to accommodate today’s larger container vessels fully loaded is in the design and engineering stage.

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.

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