French civil engineering contractor Legendre Génie Civil is renovating the Lavalette Dam in Southern France. To help do this it is utilising a tailor-made solution from Wolffkran: a Wolff 7534.16 Clear flat-top tower crane mounted on a Wolff City Portal 520.
The crane, which has been on-site since March 2025, is mounted on the portal because a road runs along the top of the dam. The portal enables traffic to pass underneath the crane when the road is open.
The crest of the dam is only 6.7 metres wide – which made delivery logistics and crane erection challenging. Twelve-metre load weight distribution beams were first installed using a mobile crane; another mobile crane, a 90 tonner, then erected both the City Portal and the flat-top.
It is being utilised to replace three floodgates (dating back to the 1950s), plus to help modernise of a fourth gate (from the 1990s). The crane is also being used to install temporary structures on the dam.
One particularly challenging phase of the project was the removal of the counterweight of one of the floodgates. The concrete block, weighing approximately 51 tonnes could not be moved as a single unit and so was split into sections on site. The individual segments, weighing up to 16 tonnes, were then removed using the Wolff crane.
“Wolffkran was the only provider able to offer a complete solution consisting of the crane, portal structure, assembly and service under the given constraints,” says François-Xavier Béthuel, head of the crane division at Legendre Matériel. “The Wolffkran team was closely involved in site planning from an early stage and is also responsible for operation, service, and maintenance throughout the approximately 24-month construction period, allowing us to source everything from a single provider.”
Images: © Lionel Ciochetto
