Emergency Silo replacement

Spring Meadow Dairy in Mount West, Nottingham Road, needed emergency facilitation of transport and installation of two silos for their raw milk.

Project Scope

It was our scope to receive the two 40 000L raw milk silos on abnormal load transporters for emergency installation due to the existing 40 000L raw milk silo having being damaged.

We needed to Crane off the silos to ground in a temporary lay down area, and set up a mobile 150 tonne crane to crane out a panelled and blown vertical 40 000L barrel silo that had been damaged during a routine CIP procedure. This was removed via an opened roof.

Two new 40 000L barrel silos were craned in via the open roof and placed onto an elevated mezzanine, protruding out the roof.

Once this was successfully carried out, the roof sheets were closed and rehabilitated and all services connected.

Major Equipment

The equipment used in this project :

• Mobile crane 150t,
• 2 crane trucks, with
• rear-mounted knuckleboom Fassi 41txm and 18.5txm, and
• 2 rigging crews.

Project Obstacles

The first obstacle that presented itself was working through the roof and the dairy personnel working below the mezzanine floor. This meant the project required special pre-operations’ precautions, especially during the Coronavirus pandemic in a live dairy processing facility environment.

The dairy workers were evacuated to a safe area, the roofing prepared for opening at 06h00 and closure of works, before darkness.

Timing was absolutely critical to the safe and successful completion of this project. This encompassed the lowering of silos into a narrow height-restricted roof entry with points that required multiple orientation techniques to achieve clearance onto the mezzanine floor.

Obstacle Solutions

Reef Rigging overcame the obstacles by the use of two-way radio communication between crane operator and rigger supervisor.

This meant that no line of sight had to be taken into account from inside the diary structure, with the guidance of banksmen riggers located on the roof and on the mezzanine floor, assisting the control with 9m taglines guiding the silos between adjacent building structures.

Project Timeline

The project took one day, from 06h00 to 18h00.

The reason it took 12 hours was because of roof rehabilitation, piping connections and silo commissioning which were required within 24 hours to receive raw milk.

If you need rigging and crane work on your project, get in touch with us on +27 (0) 82 659 3315 or send us a query here.