The job of the year competitions are always the highlight of the annual convention of the USA’s Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association, and this year was no different. The field was considerably smaller than in previous years – five compared to 14 last year – perhaps reflecting market conditions in the industry. Said one regular entrant, absent this time: ‘We had jobs we could have entered, but we didn’t make money on most of them.’
Those jobs that were entered, however, were highly impressive. One in particular was truly a ‘once in a lifetime’ project.
The competition is divided into three categories: jobs worth less than $100,000, those worth $100,000 to $750,000, and those worth more than $750,000.
In each of the first two categories there was just a single entrant: Emmert International. In the first category the job was to offload and install five generators as part of the expansion of two power stations. Three were installed at a power station in Arkansas and two in Missouri. Each generator weighed 230,000 lb (104t). They were transported from the port of Houston, where they had arrived from Europe. They were offloaded at the port, and later installed on site, using a J&R Lift ‘n’ Lock hydraulic gantry.
In the mid-size category Emmert installed a 565,000 lb (256t) gas turbine in a power station. As before, site constraints meant a crane was not feasible. A runway structure had to be built, as did lifting towers with four 100t strand jacks. A J&R lifting gantry was also used.
There were three entrants in the over $750,000 category and all were major feats. Brambles Heavy Contracting last year took out and exchanged a 904t reactor at Fawley refinery in the south of England. It had three days to put in the new reactor, which was 31m high and had a diameter of 9.4m. To install it, it was split into three sections but these sections could not be moved through the site on trailers as there were pipe racks everywhere. Instead a 525ft long runway structure was built 32ft above the ground, clear of the pipe racks, to skid the parts along.
This skidway was erected using four 220t strand jacks, which also lowered the loads at the far end. They were lifted onto the skidway in the first place with a Liebherr LR 1800 (800t) crawler crane. The three sections were then assembled on site and the old reactor lifted out.
German rigging contractor and crane hire company Scholpp is becoming a familiar name in this competition, having won in the top size category last year. Its entry this time was the relocation of a 3,500t printing press between March 2000 and November 2001 from a plant in Germany to a News International site in Kells, Ireland. This was a triumph of logistics as the press was taken apart, piece by piece, and reassembled at its destination. This meant that every piece had to be carefully labelled, then cleaned, transported, stored (because the pieces taken out first would be those that were needed last during reassembly), and put back together again. It took 720 truck loads to move all the sections of the press and each journey was 2,400km. The press sections were reinstalled using a Scholpp tailor-made hydraulic lifting gantry.
In any other year the jobs of Scholpp or Brambles could easily have won. This year, however, they were upstaged by the star turn, Mammoet’s raising of the Kursk submarine. Has there ever been a lifting operation to capture the imagination and the headlines of the world? The nuclear submarine had sunk after an on board explosion in August 2000 and was now laying 108m down, at the bottom of the Barents Sea, about 300km northeast of Norway. Mammoet was awarded the contract in late May 2001 to salvage the wreck and subcontracted most of the operations to the Mammoet-Smit joint venture. Mammoet-Smit had just five months to complete the operation, before the weather would make it impossible. A preferred bidder had been selected previously but then pulled out, insisting that the job could not be done safely with the time constraints that were being imposed.
It became a race against time.
With amazing speed, all the necessary equipment was designed and fabricated. Smit’s Giant 4 vessel was fitted with 26 strand jacks (taken from the Mammoet Sliding Gantry lifting device), each with a capacity of 900t. As the submarine weighed 9,500t, this gave a 2.5 safety factor, said Mammoet. Divers pierced the shell of the submarine and inserted specially made grippers which opened hydraulically once in place to grip the submarine from the inside. The Kursk was then lifted carefully, with a heave compensation system on the strand jacks ensuring stability of the load despite movement of the Smit barge above, and transported to drydock in Murmansk.
Wessel Helmens, Mammoet’s engineering manager, had only 10 minutes to make his presentation so what was seen was merely edited highlights of the project. A fuller account was later given by Helmens at the World Class Crane Management Seminar, held at the end of last month in Amsterdam.
Raising the Kursk was a $65m project which took 1,500,000 man hours. Some 2,000 people worked on it and there was not a single accident, despite icy weather conditions which to describe as adverse, by October, would be an understatement. The speed with which Mammoet and its subcontractors mobilised to prepare for this job, and the perfection of the execution of this high profile, political, and technically challenging operation, deserve all the plaudits that have been directed at all those involved.
It was no great surprise when Emmert International was named winner of both the ‘under $100,000’ and the ‘$100,000 to $750,000’ categories. It was no less surprising that Mammoet was declared winner of the $750,000+ category.
