By Eric Curl
Dec. 5, 2022 – The Georgia Ports Authority on Monday approved a contract with The Industrial Company (TIC) for the Ocean Terminal Dock realignment project as part of a expansion plan to service vessels carrying an excess of 16,000 shipping containers.
The dock improvements at the Savannah terminal require major infrastructure modifications such as filling in the existing slip and rebuilding the dock to allow the wide container ships to berth without impacting the federal channel inside the Savannah River, according to the staff report. The board’s approval established an overall project budget of up to $410 million.
TIC is completing the Garden City Treminal Berth 1 project and the company was recommended due to that project’s successful delivery, according to the staff.
The Ocean Terminal dock realignment “requires a sophisticated contractor who understands GPA operations and is able to deliver the project with a sequencing to complete the project as soon as possible and provide flexibility to the construction schedule that allows GPA customers to be relocated while a single container berth is available for cargo operations,” the report states.
“This is really going to be a significant project in our history,” Executive Director Griff Lynch said following the vote.
The contract award comes after the GPA approved in March the delivery of seven ship to shore cranes for the expansion of container of container operations at Ocean Terminal, which was the first of multiple planned improvements expected to increase the capacity from 300,000 to over 1.5 million containers. As a more formalized design of the dock was completed, staff determined that eight cranes would maximize the berth capacity to 1.6 million to 1.8 million containers, increase berth occupancy efficiency and reduce the wait time for ships.
At staff’s recommendation, the board also approved on Monday the purchase of an eighth crane and an increase of the budget by almost $20 million to almost $163 million. The purchase will not impact the current delivery schedule, with the first set of cranes still expected to arrive in May 2024, according to staff. Find out what else is happening this week in Savannah Agenda’s latest Week Ahead newsletter.
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