How big is the biggest ship?
"How big is the biggest ship?," asked Emily Briscoe, 8, a rising third-grader at Robert Crown School in Wauconda.
The biggest ship is as heavy as 11 semi trucks and as long as four football fields. It carries crude oil - 3 million gallons at a time - from the Persian Gulf to ports around the world. Such a large ship depends on a large crew - 27 members - to navigate from port to port.
There are four of these gigantic double-hulled tankers - the TI Africa, the TI Oceania, the TI Asia and the TI Europe. The official name is ULCC - ultra large cargo carrier. TI stands for Tankers International.
A Korean shipbuilding company, Daewoo, constructed these tankers to be fast and fuel efficient. Daewoo builds items needed for the petroleum industry like oil rigs, platforms and drilling rigs as well as submarines and destroyers.
It takes 56 days for the crew of the TI Africa, owned by New-York-based OSG Ship Management, to navigate from the Persian Gulf to Los Angeles, one of the only ports in the U.S. large enough to handle a humongous ship. When the crew needs to deliver the cargo to a smaller port, it anchors the ship at sea and pumps the crude onto smaller ships. This practice is called lightering.
The TI Africa has been in service since 2002 and is expected to be able to haul crude oil half way around the globe for the next 21 years.
Even bigger, but no longer in service, is the Knock Nevis, a supertanker that is nearly as long as the Sears Tower is tall. Even heavier than the TI supertankers still in service are a class of ships called Batillus, also out of service, that weighed another 100,000 tons more than the TI Africa, Oceania, Asia and Europe.
Check these out
The Wauconda Area Public Library suggests these titles on ships:
• "Ships," by Ian Graham
• "The Great Ships," by Patrick O'Brien, Patrick
• "Cargo Ships, " by Adele Richardson
• "Shipwrecks,." by James Stewart
• "Ships," by Darlene R. Stille
• "Amphibious Assault Ships, " by Lynn M. Stone
• "Down To The Sea In Ships," by Philemon Sturges
• "Container Ships and Oil Tankers,." by Jonathan Sutherland
• "Ships," by Philip Wilkinson
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