Chinese crane squeezes under Columbia bridge
ASTORIA, Ore. – With about four feet to spare, a 16-story crane sneaked under a Columbia River bridge at Astoria on Thursday.
The passage came in the dark, with fog, at 5:30 a.m.
For a few bleary-eyed onlookers, a glimmer of light atop the Chinese ship Zhen Hua 17 gave the only indication of just how close the crane came to scraping the span.
Three Port of Portland engineers perched on the 185-foot crane measured just four feet of clearance.
“They high-fived the beam as they went underneath it,” said Capt. Mike Tierney, one of the Columbia bar pilots who specialize in taking oceangoing ships in and out across the dangerous mouth of the river.
As Tierney and colleague Gary Lewin steered the ship toward the bridge, they had to speed up to beat a wall of fog rolling in.
It could have delayed the crossing by blocking the laser the engineers use to measure the clearance.
It is the Port of Portland’s fourth such crane, designed to unload containers from post-Panamax ships.
The crane is wrapping up a monthlong, 5,800-mile trek from Shanghai, China, to the Port of Portland’s Terminal 6.
It crossed the Columbia River bar Wednesday and anchored near Hammond to take in ballast water and wait for low tide.
Because of its unusual size and shape, the U.S. Coast Guard imposed a security zone around the crane and three tug boats are assisting it.
After Astoria, the crane has to get under the Lewis and Clark Bridge at Longview, Wash.
That will require a modification of the crane, which was built with a 3-foot folding pillar that will be dropped once the ship gets to Longview.
The crane was built by Zhenhau Port Machinery Company in Shanghai, which delivered its third such crane to Portland in May 2006.
Each of the port’s container cranes can handle about 30 containers per hour. As wide as two city blocks, they’re built to span the largest vessels that call on the Port of Portland and can reach over as many as 18 containers to grab cargo off a ship.
These large ships, referred to as “post-Panamax” because they’re too wide to fit through the Panama Canal, can carry as many as 275 20-foot containers or up to 137 40-foot containers apiece. The 40-foot containers are usually loaded on trucks or trains.