Port of Oakland
| Port of Oakland | |
|---|---|
Aerial view of the port of Oakland
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| Location | |
| Country | United States |
| Location | Oakland, California |
| Coordinates | 37°47′43.92″N 122°17′4.57″W / 37.7955333°N 122.2846028°W |
| Details | |
| Opened | 1927 |
| Available berths | 20 |
| Draft depth | 50 feet |
| Air draft | 220 feet, restricted by Golden Gate Bridge |
| Statistics | |
| Vessel arrivals | 1,775 (FY 2014) |
| Annual container volume | 2,394,069 twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) (FY 2014) |
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Website http://www.portofoakland.com/ |
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The Port of Oakland is a major container ship facility located in Oakland, California, in the San Francisco Bay. It was the first major port on the Pacific Coast of the United States to build terminals for container ships. It is now the fifth busiest container port in the United States, behind Long Beach, Los Angeles, Newark, and Savannah. Development of an intermodal container handling system in 2002 culminated over a decade of planning and construction to produce a high volume cargo facility that positions the Port of Oakland for further expansion of the West Coast freight market share.
Originally, the estuary, 500 feet (150 m) wide, had a depth of two feet at mean low tide. In 1852, the year of Oakland's incorporation as a town by the California State Legislature, large shipping wharves were constructed along the Oakland Estuary, which was dredged to create a viable shipping channel. 22 years later, in 1874, the previously dredged shipping channel was deepened to make Oakland a deep water port.
In the late 19th century, the Southern Pacific was granted exclusive rights to the port, a decision the city soon came to regret. In January 1906, a small work party in the employ of the Western Pacific Railroad, which had just begun construction, hastily threw a crossing over the SP line to connect the WP mainline with trackage built on an area of landfill. This act, protested by the SP and later held up in court, broke the railroad's grip on the port area. The courts ruled that all landfill since the date of the agreement did not belong to the SP. This ruling ended SP control and made the modern Port of Oakland possible.
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