Justifying riding the load line

[jomoco]

I'd like to see some picks of these trees.

I've done lots of entire tree picks between 15-20 tons with a 120 ton hydro crane. They even have off road construction hydro cranes in that size range and higher.

One pick and process it on the barge, it's pretty dang hard to get more efficient than that in this biz.

jomoco

 

[pdqdl]

I'd be surprised if a river barge could deliver that kind of torque except directly off the prow. As soon as you went off to the side to deliver the tree to it's landing zone with that kind of load, it could get ugly. Holding a barge sideways to the current so that you can work off the bow might get tricky, too.

I'm sure any barge engineer could tell you if it would work, and I'll bet the cranes planned for this job are already engineered for this work. If he's cutting them up in the air, you can bet it's because he must, rather than chooses to.


Not knowing any more about this stuff than I do, I think I'd just chop them into the river, and set up a seine and grapple barge to catch all the stuff as it floated down the river. But maybe that's why I don't do that kind of work for a living.

Wait! It's coming to me... Seines downstream from the work area, angled toward a conveyor dipped below the surface of the river. The river feeds the conveyor, and nothing floating escapes...

 

[alloutdoorsboy]

would it help to use a motorized rope ascender to put the climber up the tree with zero effort? Lines would have to be set obviously but some grunt with a bigshot could do that all day long. Just a thought.......

 

[BC WetCoast]

Would it be possible to put a bucket truck on the barge and still reach the trees? We've done this with a railcar, chained a bucket truck to a flat car and then used it clear trees down the right of way.

I'm still trying to see why you can't just have climbers in the trees, other than productivity. But then, as I mentioned earlier, I don't ever see climbers working off the hook because the crane companies don't allow it.

 

[John Paul Sanborn]

I'm still trying to see why you can't just have climbers in the trees, other than productivity.

I think what he is saying is that the trees are inaccessible from shore, and a number of them have submerged rootplates.

The climber may have to wade in to the basal area to get access.

would it help to use a motorized rope ascender to put the climber up the tree with zero effort?

And OSHA would approve this? Those gadgets are not approved for this type of work.

 

[booboo]

I'm familiar with the project they are trying to bid on and the section of river/trees in question. I think you could get a lot of the smaller stuff with a large bucket truck on a barge but there are some monsters in there too. The only realistic way I see is 2 cranes with the climber riding one of them. The basket idea is not realistic, too dangerous for all the reasons already mentioned. The bucket truck idea also lacks maneuverability. Spider lift or man lift, forget it, way too dangerous. Some of these trees have major side leans over the water on them too, balancing the loads is going to be a trick.

Thill - have you actually been on the water to see the trees yet? I'm assuming they want all the stuff that's fallen over into the river removed too? From a safety standpoint, you may want to mention stability of the trees also. Some of the bank sections are really unstable, don't think I'd want to be tied in to some of them when big pieces start coming off. There are a lot of other challenges on this one, current, a strong upstream wind, narrow channel, highly variable flows, other boat traffic etc...I don't see how any portion of the project will come in on time and under cost, none of it has yet. A sad part of it is that removing the trees takes out the cover and structure for a fantastic bass fishery.

Looking for other climbers?! :greenchainsaw: