STANDING almost 100 metres tall when at rest, a £10m pair of cranes planned for the quayside at Southampton Con-tainer Terminals are set to become a familiar fixture on the city's skyline.
The massive investment allows the port to handle the latest generation of giant ships, which are more than a quarter of a mile long and carry as many as 12,000 containers.
They are designed to reach across a ship 22 containers wide, eliminating the need for future generations of large vessels to turn around to fully unload.
It is part of an investment plan which will put Southampton on an equal footing with Felixstowe, currently Britain's largest container port, although it still lags way behind foreign giants like Singapore, which handles a massive 22.28m containers a year.
Bosses at SCT, which is a joint venture between Southampton docks owner ABP and Middle East group Dubai Ports World, made the crane investment off the back of a major business win off rival Thamesport, which saw an extra 250,000 containers a year directed to the city.
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