Dredging to deepen Charleston Harbor officially began Friday afternoon, after state and federal officials gathered aboard the USS Yorktown at Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant to mark the start of construction.

The South Carolina Ports Authority held the ceremony, which featured speeches from Gov. Henry McMaster and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, WCSC Live 5 reported. Jim Newsome, the authority’s president and CEO, and R.D. James, the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, were among the officials there, according to the trade publication Dredging Today.

Officials radioed the captain of a Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. dredge floating outside the Yorktown and started the work with a ceremonial flip of a switch, Live 5 reported.

The project will take the harbor from its current 45 feet to 52 feet, and its entrance channel to 54 feet, according to the authority. The authority says that will make Charleston the deepest harbor on the East Coast and let fully loaded ships too big for the old Panama Canal locks reach its terminals without waiting on the tide.

“There are no restrictions,” Newsome said, according to Live 5. “They make Panama Canal appointments that way. So, it makes the cost of shipping goods through this port the most efficient it can be.”

Two contracts so far

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Charleston District has awarded two construction contracts, both for the entrance channel, which runs more than 20 miles. The first, worth $47 million, was awarded Sept. 7, according to the Corps and the authority.

The second, a $213 million contract awarded in late October to Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co., calls for removing about 7.95 million cubic yards of material, the Corps said. Most of it will go to a disposal site offshore. Rock dredged from the channel will be used to build nine artificial reefs covering about 265 acres, plus a berm around the disposal site that will add more than 400 acres of hard bottom, according to the Corps.

The Corps puts the project’s total cost at $529 million. It said in October that construction could take 40 to 76 months, depending on funding, dredge availability, weather and other factors, and that dredging of the upper and lower harbor would overlap with part of the entrance channel work.

Newsome said he expects the dredging to be finished by August 2020, Live 5 reported.

Waiting on Washington

South Carolina has already put up its share. The General Assembly set aside $300 million for the project in 2012, according to the authority.

Federal money has come more slowly. Last May, the project was named one of six “new starts” in the Corps’ fiscal 2017 work plan, which gave it $17.5 million in construction funding and allowed construction to begin on schedule, the authority said at the time. Congress passed the bill authorizing the project in December 2016.

Graham said Friday he planned to talk to President Donald Trump about helping states that have put their own money into infrastructure projects, Live 5 reported.

“My number one priority in 2018 is to change the formula so that we get credit for the $300-million the state of South Carolina put into the system,” Graham said, according to Live 5.

McMaster said the state is in an unusual spot: because it put up so much money at the start, a new formula keeps the federal government from contributing as much, the station reported.

Getting ready for bigger ships

The ceremony came a day after two new ship-to-shore cranes arrived at the authority’s Wando Welch Terminal in Mount Pleasant. Built in China by Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industry Co., known as ZPMC, the cranes can lift containers 155 feet above the dock, the authority said.

“It is fitting to welcome the arrival of two new cranes as we begin construction on the Charleston Harbor Deepening Project,” Newsome said in a statement Thursday.

The cranes are the final stage of a $48.4 million project to strengthen and upgrade the Wando Welch wharf for larger ships, according to the authority. It is also raising four of the terminal’s existing cranes from 115 feet of lift height to 155 feet.

The big ships are already coming. The authority said Thursday that it handles 20 of the 27 weekly calls by vessels too large to fit through the Panama Canal before its expansion, and that two weekly services will use ships of 13,000 TEUs or more starting in April. A TEU, or 20-foot equivalent unit, is the standard measure of container capacity.

In September, the 14,414-TEU CMA CGM Theodore Roosevelt called on Charleston, the biggest ship ever to visit the port, the authority said at the time.

Cargo is growing, too. The port handled 1.24 million TEUs in the first seven months of its fiscal year, through January, up 1.8% from a year earlier, the authority reported last month. It plans to open Inland Port Dillon, its second rail-served inland port, in April.

The authority says port operations support 187,200 jobs in South Carolina and nearly $53 billion in annual economic activity.