A successful company must aggressively pursue work, make bold commitments and make it happen,’ Doug Williams says. Williams is general manager of Buckner Heavy Lift Cranes, and his company walked off with the top prize in the Specialised Carriers & Rigging Association’s rigging job of the year competition at the US organisation’s annual conference, held in San Antonio, Texas in April.

As usual, the competition was divided into three categories: ‘jobs under $150,000’, ‘jobs between $150,000 and $750,000’, and ‘jobs over $750,000’. Buckner won the ‘over $750,000’ category for a project that was as much about sales and marketing, persuading the client to ‘go for it’, as it was about rigging accomplishments. Its presentation, featuring a spoof of the second Mission Impossible movie, was also one of the most amusing and entertaining seen at SC&RA in recent years.

Clemson University’s Littlejohn Coliseum ­ an indoor basketball arena ­ had been built in the 1960s and for most of its life had been suffering problems with the roof structure. When the university decided to build new entrance facilities for the arena last year, it also decided to take the opportunity to solve the roof problems for ever. The flat roof structure, measuring about 100m square, was a network of steel trusses and panels. The project was initially estimated to take 18 months, meaning that the university’s basketball team faced a season with no home matches. Buckner set about persuading the university’s decision makers that it could do the job quicker. Much quicker. As planning progressed, a final schedule was set out. Buckner undertook to take out the old roof and put in the new within just 10 weeks, and took on a bonus-penalty contract.

For the work, Buckner deployed two 400t-capacity Liebherr LR 1400 crawler cranes with heavylift derrick attachments and on 11 June 2002 began removing roof panels, which weighed 42t each.

A crew of 20 men, on average, worked a single shift, seven days a week. Supports were constructed inside the arena to hold up the centre box section of the roof as the surrounding structure was taken apart. On 3 July the last panel was taken out. After a four day break for 4 July (US independence day) celebrations, the first new truss was installed.

The middle box section ­ the last part of the old roof to be removed ­ was the first part of the new to be installed.

It comprised 18m-long trusses.

By the beginning of August the whole job was done ­ in just seven and a half weeks.

Winner of the ‘$150,000 to $750,000’ category
The winner of the mid size category, ‘jobs between $150,000 and $750,000’, was Barnhart Crane & Rigging for a three-week project in May 2002 at the Barry Steam Plant, a coal fired power station, in Alabama. Barnhart’s job was to take out a pair of 30 year old feedwater heaters, each weighing 25t (55,000 lb), and replace them with a new pair, which weighed nearly 40t (87,000 lb). The tricky bit was that the only access was 20m up in the air and there was no room for a mobile crane to pick and slew. The old and the new heaters had to be manoeuvred through an opening that was just 3.5m at its narrowest point. The dimensions of the tubular loads were about 14m by 1.5m. Barnhart said it was like ‘threading a needle’.

To do the job, Barnhart used its own custom modular lifting tower as an overhead crane. A runway was constructed at a height of 20m, supported by the lifting tower at one end and the structure of the power station at the other. A hydraulic gantry, with a single 450t capacity strand jack, travelled on the runway for lifting and lowering.

Winner of the ‘jobs under $150,000’ category
The winner of the ‘jobs under $150,000’ category was Emmert International for a project that attracted a lot of media attention in the company’s home city of Portland, Oregon. Residents of, and visitors to, that city will be familiar with the humourous statue of legendary giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan. The 11m-high statue has become a landmark and an icon in the region since being built in 1959 for the Oregon centennial celebrations.

In February 2002 the statue had to be moved to make way for a light rail system that was being constructed. Bunyan only had to move 15m, but move he must. Because the concrete base of the 6t statue had no rebar and was fractured, Emmert decided to tunnel (by hand) underneath the structure and winch in I beams under the plinth. Hydraulic jacks were used to raise the load and support structure onto hydraulic dollies. Excavation and preparation took five days. The journey itself took just 15 minutes.