(Photo courtesy Northwest Seaport Alliance)

This should be a sight at sea sometime Friday – a big ship carrying four of the biggest container cranes on the West Coast, headed to Tacoma. From the Northwest Seaport Alliance announcement:

Puget Sound Pilots are scheduled to board the Zhen Hua 28, a 761-foot-long heavy-lift ship, early Friday morning in Port Angeles and begin the journey to Tacoma. … The ship will sit at anchor in Commencement Bay for a day or two before delivering the cranes to Husky Terminal at the northwest end of the Blair Waterway. The Northwest Seaport Alliance ordered eight new super-post-Panamax cranes from Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries Co. Ltd (ZPMC) in China through a competitive bid process. No container cranes currently are manufactured in the U.S. ZPMC is the largest heavy-duty equipment manufacturer in the world and delivers more than 200 cranes every year around the world, including many seaports in the U.S. The other four cranes will arrive in 2019.

Find out more about the cranes in this NWSA video:

They’ll be 50 feet higher than the biggest ones in the area now, with “an outreach of 24 containers and a lift height of 165 feet above the pier deck.” The Tacoma terminal where they’ll be used is part of an ongoing overhaul project.