(July 25, 2003) -- One of the two largest container ships in the world, named for the City of Long Beach, made its maiden call at the Port of Long Beach shortly before dawn today. Accompanied by water-spraying fireboats and tugs, the "OOCL Long Beach" -- a Hong Kong-registered behemoth nearly four football fields long and wider than the Panama Canal -- can carry 8,063 twenty-foot-long cargo containers, eclipsing 6,600 containers carried by what were previously by the largest vessels.

Photo source: Art Wong, Port of LB

The OOCL Long Beach, deployed in Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL)'s trans-Pacific service, is 1,056 feet long and 140 feet wide.

A Port of LB release says the OOCL Long Beach docked at the Pier F LB Container Terminal, a facility leased by an OOCL subsidiary. The Port release says the OOCL Long Beach is part of a new generation of 8,000-twenty-foot-equivalent-unit (TEU) vessels that have leapfrogged a generation of 6,600-TEU ships that made their first LB calls only four years ago. The OOCL Long Beach is the second of ten 8,063-TEU SX-class vessels on which OOCL will take delivery in the next three years from shipbuilder Samsung Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. of South Korea.

LB Harbor Commission President John Hancock said in the Port's release, "This is a really big ship, a powerful vessel named after a strong city and strong port. Among those we must credit for this ships is the public. Without their demand for the goods that this ship carries, there would have been no chance for this vessels to become the reality we see today."

On its web site, OOCL says in part: