At the start of this year Wels, Upper Austria-headquartered lifting and transportation specialist Felbermayr installed a new harbour gate into place at a commercial port on the river Danube in Linz, Austria. The operation went smoothly and the harbour gate flood protection system was officially inaugurated on July 2nd.
The work was part of municipal public services company Linz AG’s ‘Safe Port of Linz’ imitative aimed at providing comprehensive flood protection.
Felbermayr was commissioned for the logistics and lifting duties by Austrian company Andritz who produced the steel harbour gate in Turkey. The gate was shipped from Turkey to Austria horizontally in two parts. On arrival the parts were unloaded at Felbermayr’s own heavy lift terminal at the port and assembled.
The harbour gate parts were then transported to the installation site on a deck barge, propelled by inland cargo boat ‘Grafenau’.
Once in position the two parts of the harbour gate were hoisted from the barge and into position using a 650-tonne LTM 1650 mobile crane. The crane reached a maximum radius of 18 metres and was loaded with 135 tonnes of ballast.
The lower part of the harbour gate measured 27.70 metres long, 2.60 metres wide and 5.30 metres high. Once the first section had been secured, the upper section was lifted into place. This measured 35.7 metres long, 2.3 metres wide and 4.9 metres high. The horizontally guided sliding gate has a clear passage width of 26 metres.
Other equipment deployed during the installation operation included a 400-tonne gantry crane, plus two mobile cranes with maximum lifting capacities of 150 and 160 tonnes.
“It was an interesting, unusual project,” said Michael Maier-Bauer, project manager at Felbermayr.
This was partly because there was a delay in the flood gates arriving in Austria due to bad weather conditions putting pressure on the project’s schedule.
“On top of the time pressure posed by the delay and the extreme weather conditions, the nature of the components also presented a challenge,” Maier-Bauer, continued. “Their centre of gravity was not favourable. They had to be attached with centimetre precision so as to guarantee that they could be lifted vertically into the gate chamber during installation.”
Despite the challenges Felbermayr completed the operation without problems in front of the public, politicians and media who all turned out to watch.
Now that the new harbour gate system is in place it will help to protect more than 560 hectares of industrial land, right up to the town centre, from flooding for an estimated 300 years. It also ensures that trans-shipping, storage and transport activities can carry when there is a flood.
