Giant crane takes over heavy lifting at Port of Charleston
Published in: The Post and Courier
Date: 5/17/2005
By: Kris Wise
May 17–The huge ships that move goods through Charleston Harbor might have met their match.
Lurking in the water is the new “Charleston Giant,” a floating contraption that captures the record as the most powerful barge-based crane in the Southeast.
It can move 900,000 pounds of cargo — 450 tons — in a single bound.
That means the Giant can easily lift an 800,000-pound Boeing 747. It could move more than 300 new Volkswagen Beetles at one time. And it could pick up Los Angeles’ famous Hollywood sign — two of them, in fact.
More to the point, the Giant will move loads that are too big for regular cranes at the Port of Charleston to tackle.
“There has been nothing in the South Atlantic like this for a long time,” said Benjamin “Bos” Smith, operations manager for Stevens Towing Co. “A lot of this heavy cargo business has been going to Houston or Norfolk. We want to open (the Port of Charleston) back up for this business.” Stevens Towing teamed up with Batesburg-based J.E. Oswalt and Sons, a heavy-cargo lifting outfit, to design and build the Giant. They’ve created a new firm, Charleston Heavy Lift LLC, to operate the machine.
The crane, unlike the land-based behemoths nestled on the Port of Charleston docks, sits on a barge and moves across the water from port terminal to terminal, wherever there’s a super-sized load that needs to be moved.
The Giant’s lifting capacity outpaces other floating cranes in the Southeast by about 200,000 pounds. The next-largest barge-based monster is in Norfolk, Va., and it can lift only 700,000 pounds.
“People will pay for it because it does do anything,” Smith said Monday.
The Giant rises about 130 feet out of the water, but it folds up to a neat 57 feet to work its way under bridges and move anywhere it needs to go.
While shorter than some Port of Charleston cranes that tower over the harbor, the Giant’s barge-bound supports allow it to lift much heavier loads.
In a little over a month since it’s been up and running, the Giant already has moved a couple of 234-ton turbines from General Electric’s Greenville plant. The loads were moved by train to Charleston, where the Giant packed them onto ships headed for Iraq and China.
Last month, the crane was used to remove an F-16 fighter jet that crashed into the marsh along the Ashley River.
It also has hauled another nearly 700,000-pound crane from one dilapidated barge to a newer one.
An average cargo move on the Giant costs about $14,000 or $15,000, but the lift company will charge on a project-by-project basis for any load over 500,000 pounds, Smith said.
“We know the market is good right now,” he said, estimating the crane’s current market value as at least $4 million.
The Giant was assembled in March from a smaller crane that’s been used for the past several years to move construction modules at a Goose Creek engineering firm.
Charleston Heavy Lift rebuilt the crane to respond to demands for bigger and more powerful cranes. More and more U.S. companies, especially utilities, are shipping in huge machines and machine parts from overseas. They’re also sending back even more oversized products, cargo too big to be moved by most ports’ dockside cranes.
The biggest floating cranes on the East Coast are in New York and New Jersey, where the largest crane can lift a whopping 1,000 tons, or 2 million pounds.
“Charleston is unique on the East Coast because it’s got the best railroad clearances in the South Atlantic,” Smith said. “We can put bigger, heavier, wider pieces on (railroads) and move them in and out.” For that reason, the Port of Charleston has been poised to become a pick-up and drop-off spot for much of the heaviest equipment moving in and out of the Southeast.
“We have a waterfront workforce that has experience with it and a good reputation for it, but we just haven’t had the equipment,” said State Ports Authority spokesman Byron Miller. “We’ve had to rely on shipside (cranes) and the actual ship’s gear to handle a lot of big projects.” In the 1980s, the Port of Charleston had Big Blue, a floating crane that wasn’t quite as big as the Giant but could still handle about 400 tons of cargo. The crane blew over during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and was destroyed.
A few years after that, along came Hercules. That floating crane was owned by contractors building the Mark Clark Expressway, but it was moved out of Charleston a few years after the road project wrapped up.
Several jobs already are lined up for the Giant in coming weeks. In June, the crane will move two 450,000-pound boilers for BP Amoco’s plant expansion in Cainhoy, and it will transport a massive tire press for Michelin’s Lexington facility, where the firm makes its 14-foot tires.
There’s huge potential as well for the Giant to come in handy if South Carolina is selected as the site for Airbus’ newest U.S. facility, Smith said. North Charleston is one of four cities competing for the tanker jet plant.
“If they need to bring in a full airplane fuselage, they’ll need this crane,” Smith said.
COPYRIGHT 2005 The Post and Courier