A fishing boat is dwarfed by the MSC Tomoko the biggest ship that's ever come into the Port of Hampton Roads, according to port officals. Here it's just east of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel on Monday, Feb. 15, 2010. (David B. Hollingsworth | The Virginian-Pilot)
By Robert McCabe
The Virginian-Pilot
© February 16, 2010
The biggest container ship to call on the port of Hampton Roads - the MSC Tomoko - arrived about noon Monday.
If you happened to be in the vicinity of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, it would have been hard to miss.
About as large as a Navy aircraft carrier, the Tomoko is about 1,090 feet long and 142 feet wide. It can carry the equivalent of about 8,400 20-foot containers, lined 17-wide across its deck. The huge white "MSC" initials on its hull stand for Mediterranean Shipping Co., the world's second-largest container shipping line.
The Virginia Port Authority late last week heralded the ship's arrival as a harbinger of the size of vessel the port will see once the Panama Canal is widened in about four years. The Tomoko and ships its size - and larger - are too big to pass through the canal now.
"The arrival of the MSC Tomoko marks an exciting milepost for The Port of Virginia," said Jerry A. Bridges, executive director of the port authority, in a posting on its blog. "The Suez Canal is unconstrained and the Panama Canal is undergoing a massive five-year expansion project. This doesn't mean all of the vessels calling Virginia are going to be this size, but this is the beginning."
Yet the authority blog posting offered little more information about the ship.
A Mediterranean Shipping Co. official in Charleston, S.C., who insisted on anonymity, said he could do no more than confirm basic facts about the ship, all of which can be found on the Internet.
The company official said the Hampton Roads stop was the line's third call in the port after including it in MSC's revised "Golden Gate" service, which links China and Southeast Asia with U.S. East Coast ports through the Suez Canal.
The Tomoko called in New York and Baltimore before heading to Hampton Roads, the MSC official confirmed. No one would say how long the ship would be in town, but its next destination is Freeport in the Bahamas before it steams back through the Suez Canal en route ultimately to Hong Kong.
Late Monday afternoon, port officials said they did not have accurate information about how many containers would be unloaded from and loaded onto the vessel, which berthed at Norfolk International Terminals.
Out of 4,661 container ships worldwide at the end of 2008, only 198 had a capacity of more than 8,000 20-foot containers, according to a 2009 report by RREEF Research, part of the Deutsche Bank Group.
Nearly 300 ships capable of handling 8,000-plus containers were on order, according to the report.
