Heavy Lift II

These amazing ships are built to carry floating objects further than they could travel under their own power – damaged ships, oil platforms, massive loads that simply can’t be loaded onto conventional ships. They are among the largest ships if the world.

Gusto MSC’s “Oleg Strashnov” floating crane is an engineering marvel - transportable and mounted on ships that serve the booming wind energy sector in Europe. Gusto MSC is at the forefront of a new telescopic crane that operates in small spaces but with extremely long reach, ideal for ports where the space is limited but the need for extension is great. We compare these technologies to the traditional ring cranes operating worldwide and explore the latest in technologies of heavy lift at sea.

The Hebron project is a plan to exploit a 700 million barrel heavy oil field off the east coast of Canada with the world’s largest oil platform. The Italian company Fagioli was employed to transport the crew quarters from Korea to Bull Arm, near St John’s in Canada, and install all the component parts onto the giant platform. It was a record breaking journey and epic effort to load the huge structure onto the massive Dockwise Vanguard and transport it all the way across the Pacific Ocean, through the Panama Canal and up the coast of North America.

Although dogged by controversy, the Mose, a system of mobile walls that emerge when the sea is about to submerge the city of Venice, is nearing completion. Moving the massive floating barriers is a job that Fagioli has been accomplishing for several years now, but never before has the company actually laid 19 of them in one session. Each barrier weighs 40 tonnes and needs to be attached to a complex system of levers and hinges. The logistics of moving the barriers is a nightmare, as they come in from the work sites and are laid on top of the concrete emplacements. It is a race against time, to save the city from the winter high tides. But will it work?

Subject of a BBC documentary, the new sarcophagus of Chernobyl was completed at the end of 2017. Two French companies won the contract financed by the European Bank of Reconstruction to seal off the deteriorating mountain of cement that had been poured over the second reactor of the Chenobyl plant in 1989.

Ariane 5 is the largest rocket in operation today. It carries the heaviest loads of any rockets of the present or past and at nearly 60 meters height, is also the tallest. It is the heavy lift workhorse of space and is built in France under the direction of the Airbus Defence and Space in Toulouse.