German crane and heavy haulage company Wiesbauer has put its recently acquired LTM 1650-8.1 mobile crane from Liebherr to use for the first time as it lifted large construction modules onto the flat roof of a hospital clinic building.
Wiesbauer, as the crane contractor for this project, faced major challenges in installing large modules – which measured up to 17 m long and 4.8 m wide – onto the roof of a children’s clinic in Heilbronn, Germany to create new classrooms for the hospital. These included having to pass through a narrow section on the access road to the site with the 8-axle crane, as well as a gatehouse and a listed wall bordering either side of the site’s entrance.
“No other crane in this load capacity class is built compactly enough to get through here,” explained Christoph Kriegel, who coordinated the operation as project manager for Wiesbauer. “We couldn’t set up the crane on the other side of the hospital wing due to shafts and ducts underground.”
Given their dimensions, the modules could not be transported to the site on the road transport vehicles because of the bottleneck at the site access road. Instead, a small mobile crane at the entrance handled the bulky loads onto a lorry, which shuttled inside and moved the prefabricated components to the LTM 1650-8.1.
Kriegel revealed that, “We would have needed a luffing jib for the short telescopic mast, but we didn’t have enough space to set it up here.” Deploying the long version of the mobile crane’s telescopic boom allowed for the lifting of the construction modules onto the hospital roof.
Initially in the planning phase, there was a requirement that the Liebherr crane should be able to retract its boom when a rescue helicopter approaches the hospital’s heliport, just 100 m away. However, the approach and departure direction for the helicopters was then changed so that the crane could continue during helicopter operations.
“I’m already familiar with working with the 700-tonne truck because I also drove our first LTM 1650-8.1,” said crane operator Ralf Hoffmann. “The road trip with the large telescopic boom, for which we had a special permit with a total weight of 106 tonnes, was a bit top-heavy, but it went well. Accessing the site, on the other hand, was actually a bit tricky.”
With approximately 160 employees, Wiesbauer has around 70 mobile, mobile tower folding and crawler cranes up to the 1,000-tonne class. As well as crane services, the company offers heavy haulage and industrial assembly services.
