28 – Work, Part 2

Banner on entrance road

What in the world am I doing in Saudi Arabia?  Building a seaport.  A seaport that will primarily handle container traffic.  One that is "designed for the largest global vessels".  Seriously.




Container ship



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our port has 3 Liebherr STS cranes (pronounced LEE-bear), 22 Liebherr RTG cranes, 1 Liebherr mobile crane, and 3 ZPMC STS cranes (pronounced ZED-P-M-C).  Kalmar Reach Stackers and Empty Container Handlers will arrive soon.  All of our cranes have custom paint jobs of yellow and dark green (Saudi colors) and are emblazoned with the NPS logo and “KING ABDULLAH PORT”.

 

It is not possible to convey the size of these machines through photographs.

 

STS04 with upturned boom;
STS05 to the right, boomless;
STS06 still lying down;
two RTGs behind them;
a long way from the camera

Typical STS cranes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of our Liebherr STS cranes is completely assembled, another will have the boom extension attached in the next two or three days, and the last was "stood up" this past week.  Our STS cranes have a 50m (over 160 feet) clear lift – that’s a 13-story building – with the crane superstructure extending above that dimension.  They ride on rails along the wharf, and move containers between the ships and terminal trailers that constantly arrive and depart on the wharf far below.

 

As a last attempt to illustrate the size of these babies, I submit the photo below of an STS operator cabin -- where the operator(s) work the crane.  You can see an operator cabin in the "typical" photo above, at the upper right corner of the crane's frame. (Click the picture for a larger image, and look for the white box at the top right.)  Look carefully at the photo below.  Can you see me in the white polo shirt waving?  Now transfer that size and scale to the photo above. 

 

"How you doin'?"

 



Typical 1 over 6 RTGs  (note concrete tyre paths and orange terminal truck peeking out)

Fourteen of our 22 Liebherr RTG (Rubber-Tyred Gantry) cranes are completely assembled.  Next week, they will be driven to a section of the container yard for commissioning – testing and performance trials.  Our RTGs are "1 over 6" meaning they can stack 1 more container on top of a stack of 6.  They have a clear lifting height of 21m (69 feet) which is about equal to a 5-story building.  RTGs work inside the container yard moving containers between the aforementioned trailers and the container stacks.

 

Hud standing beside RTG tyre

The Liebherr Mobile Port Crane came in almost fully assembled on a ship from Kerry, Ireland.  It's used for small loads, or ships that don't pull up under the STS cranes.  Of course, being mobile, it can also be used for lots of incidental lifting tasks.

 

LHM 550 -- a big and bad mobile crane

The drawing to the left shows the mobile crane can pick up loads 40m away from its base and up to 15m below its base; at the bottom of a ship's hull, for example.  Max lifting capacity is 124 tons.  The base is 13.5m with outriggers set, or about 45 feet.

 

Below, my roommate Marlon is lounging against a bollard as the delivery ship approaches with the mobile crane aboard.  The crane's grey tower is immediately behind the ship's white personnel area.  The orange ship cranes are pretty big, too, eh?

 

 

Marlon, chilling in the Kingdom

The ZPMC cranes arrived this afternoon, fully assembled on a ship from Shanghai.  They will be rolled off the ship on temporary rails and transferred to our quay rails.  I’ve seen this on YouTube (yes, there are useful videos there) but am waiting impatiently to see it with my own eyes.  Our ZPMC cranes are identical in size to the Liebherr cranes, differing primarily by a double-beam boom (instead of Liebherr's truss) and cables in the superstructure instead of Liebherr's solid links.

 

How did this this top-heavy ship make it across the Indian Ocean?

 

Hauling on a hawser mooring line

It being Eid and all, we didn't have our full complement of mooring gang when the ZPMC ship arrived, so several of us office types hauled on lines (I pulled on four) and the operations manager acted as the gangmaster, talking to the ship's captain via walkie-talkie.  I was wondering why these Chinese sailors wanted 14 mooring lines led to our bollards, but then I realized we're offloading 100-ton STS cranes tomorrow.  They don't want any ship movement when those cranes start rolling.

 

Our container yard is taking shape.  Here is a photo of a couple of the container blocks.  The area is covered with brick pavers, since they are easily replaced if damaged.  Repairing damage to an asphalt container block requires the entire block to be taken out of service and a paving machine brought into the busy terminal area.  Repairing a container block made of brick pavers takes one guy, a couple of bricks, and a bucket of sand.

 

Paving blocks for a long way in all directions, sturdy even at 105F

I only have a few photos of our 50 Sinotruk Chinese-manufactured terminal trucks, and no photos of our Indonesian Dutch Lanka container trailers.  The trucks were delivered to Jeddah Tuesday, since our neophyte port isn’t big enough to have handled the vehicle transport ship and the ZPMC crane ship at the same time.  I asked about how many drivers we would need to get the trucks from Jeddah to KAP.  “Those trucks don’t go faster than 40kph, so we’re not driving them.”

The trailers are coming on three separate ships, all scheduled to arrive by  August 21.

 

Sinotruks in Shanghai: Standing by for inspection, sir!

 

Driving Sinotruks onto the transport ship

So ......

Our port in Saudi Arabia is where Irish/German RTGs will stack containers, brought to the container blocks by Indonesian trailers pulled by Chinese trucks, offloaded from ships by Irish/German or Chinese STS cranes.  Our humans are coming from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Egypt, Nepal, the Sudan, and Lybia.  English is the language of choice.

It's a beautiful world!