The flood protection system at the port of Linz, Austria, was officially inaugurated on July 2. Back in early January, heavy lifting and transport specialist Felbermayr was on hand to lift the new harbour gate into place.
The harbour gate system at the port of Linz is part of a project to provide comprehensive flood protection on the Danube River. It will help protect more than 560 ha of industrial land up to the town centre from a flooding event.
For its part in the project, Felbermayr was commissioned by Andritz to handle the heavy good logistics on site and lift the two steel structures that made up the harbour gate.
Shipped from Türkiye, the components arrived at the port of Linz a day later than scheduled. Once at the port, the structures were unloaded at the Felbermayr heavy lift terminal, with the lower part of the harbour gate measuring 27.7 m x 2.6 m x 5.3 m. The upper section measured 35.7 m x 2.3 m x 4.9 m.
“Alongside the 400-tonne gantry crane, two mobile cranes with maximum lifting capacities of 150 and 160 tonnes were also deployed,” explained Michael Maier-Bauer, project manager at Felbermayr Transport and Lifting Technology Linz.
With the units offloaded, they were then loaded onto the lighters that had been moored to the push-boat Grafenau. They were then transported from the harbour to the construction site at the port.
Using a 650-tonne LTM 1650 mobile crane, the structures were lifted into the harbour gate chamber at the entrance of the port of Linz.
“It was an interesting, unusual project. On top of the time pressure posed by the delay and the extreme weather conditions, the nature of the components also presented a challenge,” added Maier-Bauer. “Their centre of gravity was not favourable. In other words, they had to be attached with centimetre precision so as to guarantee that they could be lifted vertically into the gate chamber during installation.”
Earlier this month, Felbermayr added an LTM 1650 mobile crane to its fleet.
