The Altoona Water Authority dryer is suspended from two cranes outside the Westerly Treatment Plant control building after the truck that brought it from New Jersey drove away. Mirror photo by William Kibler
As jobs for crane operators go, it was one of the easy ones, according to Greg Saylor of Bryce Saylor & Sons.
But placing the Altoona Water Authority’s new 63-ton sludge dryer into the control building at the Westerly Sewer Treatment Plant Monday nevertheless required two massive lifting machines, months of planning, a large crew, lots of auxiliary vehicles and various pieces of accessory equipment — plus flexibility to adjust plans on the fly.
Work began around 7 a.m., and the dryer was in place in a former storage room by mid-afternoon — although it still needed to be adjusted prior to the eventual excavation, forming and pouring of concrete piers for a permanent anchoring.
The first task Monday was to maneuver the trailer on which the dryer had arrived Saturday from New Jersey in front of the garage door opening to the former storeroom.
Workers then attached a spreader-bar system, with rounded Kevlar slings, to each end of the dryer, a 120-ton capacity crane on the light end and a 175-ton crane on the heavy end, with the gear mechanism.
The cranes then lifted the dryer clear of the trailer, and truck driver Paul Tanaka pulled the trailer away and parked.
The crane operators then coordinated the swing of their telescoping booms, coupled with the extension and retraction of those booms and the raising and lowering of the cables attached to the dryer to rotate the big machine perpendicular to the door opening.
The initial plan for the next step was to place a roller plate under the end of the machine farthest from the building, hook one of the cranes to the end closest to the building, lower the boom so that it could fit through the garage door opening, then extend it in order to roll the machine inward, according to Mark Perry, the authority general manager.
But the boom would only go down as far as 3 inches above the top of the garage door opening, Saylor said.
So Saylor executed his alternate plan. Workers placed the roller plates under the end closest to the building, then hooked one crane to the other end of the machine, with the boom roughly perpendicular to the machine.
That allowed the crane operator to swing the boom toward the building, propelling the dryer through the door, according to Todd Musser, the authority’s director of sewer operations.
That got the machine almost all of the way inside.
From there, workers used a large forklift to push the machine, with rollers now on all four corners, farther into the building and to the left, positioning it to match lines that had been drawn on the floor.
That final operation was slow and painstaking, with workers frequently raising up the front corners of the dryer with a jack, so they could reorient the roller plates, adjusting the direction of travel as the forklift pushed.
The machine needed to be placed in a precise location so connections can be made with preset gas lines and a prefabricated conveyor system that has not yet been delivered, Musser said.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.
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