Two early Paceco container handling cranes in California’s San Francisco Bay Area in the USA have been dismantled by Rigging International.
The contractor was working for the Port of Oakland to bring down the cranes at Ben Nutter Terminal. The original founders of Rigging International erected the cranes in the first place in the 1960s.
The cranes were manufactured by the Pacific Coast Engineering Company (Paceco), at a time when containerisation was revolutionising the cargo handling industry. Paceco led the way in ship-to-shore container cranes and its design was licensed around the world.
The crane shown being dismantled, Paceco 241, had a service life in excess of 50,000 operating hours and moved hundreds of thousands of containers. This generation of crane has now become virtually obsolete as container vessels have got bigger big enough to carry 8,000 standard 20ft containers. Today’s super post-Panamax cranes stand more than 100m high and at 140m long they can reach across a vessel that is 22 containers wide.
