Posted on August 7, 2023
Elected and appointed officials, including U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, will participate in a ribbon cutting at the Port of Houston Friday to celebrate the Bayport Container Terminal Expansion, also known as the Wharf 6 Expansion project.
It should be completed and operational by October 1.
The Port of Houston is on the move – particularly now – after those painful pandemic supply chain slowdowns.
“We saw a lot of weakness in our system exposed, just-in-time delivery models that leave no room for disruptions or error. People can get short if there is a surprise,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg will be in Houston to celebrate the Wharf 6 Expansion, which adds 1,000 new feet of dock and three new ship-to-shore cranes.
Those cranes were an eyeful, arriving last week from China, making a total of 15 of these massive cranes at the Bayport Terminal. They can load or unload ships laden with TEUs or Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit containers with remarkable speed.
“The largest vessel we see today is 10,000 TEUs. That vessel can be turned on average in about 48 hours, Director of Container Terminals Ryan Mariacher said. “Cargo dwell, which is the time a container sits on terminal, has returned to pre-pandemic levels or in some cases even lower.”
Watch U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s interview:
Faster turnarounds means better business and faster product deliveries to customers.
The port is also celebrating work on Project 11, a billion-dollar multi-year effort that should be completed in 2025.
“It widens the ship channel in bay reach, allowing for safe two-way unrestricted navigation of vessels, as well as deepening further upstream,” Mariacher said.
After the ribbon cutting, elected and appointed officials will take a boat tour of parts of the Ship Channel.
