January 31 - DHL Industrial Projects has transported a 100-tonne medical magnet from Oxford to Minnesota.
The magnet was first moved from its manufacturing plant in Oxford to the port of Killingholme in Lincolnshire on a truck trailer.
"Due to its weight, the floor of the warehouse in oxford had to be reinforced and we used a mega-lift system to get it onto the trailer for transportation," explained Nikola Hagleitner, ceo of industrial projects at DHL Global Forwarding.
At Killingholme, the magnet was lifted onto a ferry for shipment to Antwerp, before being transhipped and delivered via the Great Lakes to Duluth, where it was transferred onto a 19-axle step-deck truck, which was 193 ft long.
Transportation regulations in the US require a state police escort for transport of this size, so a complex procedure requiring handover and overlap between state police, local police and private security took place, and the truck had to have at least two escorts ar all times.
The magnet was finally delivered to the University of Minnesota, where it was unloaded and moved into its final position on the university campus.
The magnet is a part of a body scanner for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) used in the medical profession as a method of disease detection, and is part of the largest scanner ever built, said DHL.
