What does roughly 322,000,000 pounds floating on water look like? Here, watch as it eclipses a view of Alcatraz…
That’s the “largest container ship ever to call any seaport in North America,” according to the Port of Oakland, where the MSC Fabiola tied up yesterday. The port says:
The MSC Fabiola is a “12,562 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent-unit) vessel…The MSC Fabiola is almost a quarter mile long, more than the length of four football fields or about equal to the height of a 55-story building. If all of the containers that fit on the ship were put end to end, they would stretch almost 50 miles.
Of the more than 5,000 container ships deployed around the world, only 71 have a capacity of 12,500 TEUs or more, and the MSC Fabiola is the only one to have regular port calls in the United States. Virtually all vessels in this ultra-large class are deployed in the Asia-Europe trade lane.
The vessel was built is 2010 in South Korea. It’s top speed is 25.3 knots. It weighs 146,093 metric tons, which is about 322,000,000 pounds. (I looked it up.)