It was going to take 12 days to replace four condensers and eight water boxes at the Arkansas nuclear power plant in Russellville, Arkansas. At least that was what the client reckoned, because these condenser bundles were not small. They measured 45ft long by 18ft high and more than 13ft wide (13.7m x 5.5m x 4m) and weighed 220,000lb (100t). The shell-like water boxes each weighed 30t. And care had to be taken. Each condenser bundle has 10,000 tubes; it takes six months to build one bundle.
But when it came to bidding for the job, Barnhart Crane & Rigging of Memphis, Tennessee promised to complete the project in just six days. The contract incentivised Barnhart with a bonus/penalty clause: a $2,500 bonus for every hour under six days, a $2,500 penalty for every hour over.
With that extra motivation, Barnhart did the job in just over 48 hours and earned itself a bonus upwards of $200,000.
To its credit, the company spread the bonus around the crew that had made it all possible and each team member was rewarded with one hour’s pay for every hour saved – which works out at something around two weeks wages or more. A further bonus was the Unit 2 condenser changeout contract, a job completed in January this year.
Equipment used on the April 1998 job included a custom-built gantry crane with a 90ft (27.4m) span, Goldhofer trailers, 32 powered rollers – built by Barnhart and with 50t capacity each – and a 400t-capacity Liebherr LTM 1400 all terrain crane, equipped with a third hoist which proved “ideal”, said Alan Barnhart, who gave a presentation on the project as an entry in the Crane & Rigging Job of the Year contest at the annual conference of the Specialised Carriers & Rigging Association in St Petersburg, Florida last month.
Barnhart’s Arkansas project took the prize as Job of the Year in the top category for contracts worth more than $750,000.
Other contenders in this category were Fenton Rigging Company of Cincinatti, Ohio and Apex Industrial Movers of Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Fenton’s entry was a project involving the replacement of an old three-span truss rail bridge over a river in Tennessee with a new three-span girder bridge. In contrast to the winning entry, this contract, for which Fenton was total turnkey contractor, lasted from 26 January to 19 December 1998.
Key to winning the contract in the first place was submitting a bid which involved the minimum number of track possessions or “outages” to keep the trains running.
“We used six 12-hour outages during the whole project,” said Fenton president Larry Roy. Because the river rose and fell with dramatic speed, conventional crane barges could not be used for the lift out/lift in, so a shallow draught, non-swinging barge was used. The replacement spans weighed up to 280 US tons.
Apex Industrial Movers’ entry involved the load out of industrial plant onto a barge and delivering it 48 hours away to Western Pulp’s mill in Port Alice on Vancouver Island. The load comprised four digestor vessels, 14ft (4.3m) diameter and 65ft (19.8m) high, and weighing 250 US tons.
In the mid-range category, for projects worth between $100,000 and $750,000, there were only two entrants and it was Bragg Crane & Rigging of Long Beach, California that picked up the prize, thus preventing a Barnhart double. Bragg’s project was the replacement of the main air blower at the Arco refinery in Los Angeles. Bragg had installed the original unit in 1992 and that had proved a tight fit. But the new unit was 3ft larger than the old one and 60% heavier at 130 US ton. The issue was not weight, but size. Using a six-tower, split gantry system and Lift Systems 4800A jacks (which at full extension can support 95 US ton each), installation was carried out with less than two inches (about 50mm) to spare in any direction. Teflon-based sliders were used with hydraulic rams to provide the neccesary side shift.
Barnhart’s entry in this category was the assembly and erection of a KCI Konecranes gantry crane in Suriname, South America. The gantry had a 60m span, weighed 300t and had a hook height of 40m. For its erection, Barnhart designed a lift tower system, based on its existing equipment, keeping a firm eye on ensuring it would be easy to transport and set up on site.
Like Barnhart Crane & Rigging, Bragg Crane & Rigging was also going for the double with an entry in the “less than $100,000” category. Using a 180 US ton capacity American 165 truck crane for the main lift and an American 8460 as tail crane, Bragg had removed and replaced a depropaniser vessel in the Tosco refinery, Wilmington, California. The challenge was gaining access to the site; 25 bridges had to be crossed, of which 10 needed to be shored to take the load. The old vessel had to be removed whole as its insulation contained asbestos.
But Bragg lost out in this category to Emmert International of Clackamas, Oregon for a tricky piece of engineering in July 1998 to remove an old iron bridge. The river bank was elevated (paying due regard to environmental considerations), hydraulic jacks installed, the bridge raised, a 70 US ton dolly slid under and the bridge was towed away, aided by four 75 US ton Hilman skates. It sounds straightforward, but the bridge was 100ft (30m) long and weighed 240,000lb (109t).
The clincher to this story, though, is that Emmert was given salvage rights to the bridge so it was stored away for future use. This summer that old bridge will be wheeled out on another Emmert project, saving thousands of dollars, thus prompting Terry Emmert to call the project “the deal of the year”.
