Johnson Arabia recently executed a heavy lifting job for a luxury yacht owner in the UAE which involved three tandem lifts of yachts weighing 80 tonnes, 89 tonnes and 250 tonnes. The rental company employed three of its cranes – the 400t and 350t Terex crawler cranes and 130t Grove mobile crane – and carefully assembled them to lift the yachts from the docking area and place them on the water.
The entire lifting project was completed in less than a week with careful planning from Johnson Arabia’s team led by Mohammed Fareed and engineering managed by Sreethu Thulaseedharan.
Initial tests conducted at the jetty where the yacht was to be lifted off revealed that the jetty might not be able to support the weight of the yacht and crane together. To solve this issue, the Johnson Arabia team used wooden pads underneath the cranes to enable them to perform the heavy lift. Considering the various lifts required, including straight lifts with one crane and tandem lifts with two cranes, the crane capacities were precisely studied and certain configurations were selected to have extra and sufficient safety margins while lifting the highest load. The cranes were fully rigged on site by taking into account the site parameters and restrictions in order to overcome every possible challenge during the lifting operations.
Mohammed Fareed Nasser, executive manager, Dubai, Northern Emirates and Oman, Johnson Arabia, says: “For a project with such heavy lifts, we have to be very vigilant of the safety of our team, the other equipment on the dock and ensure our riggers did a thorough job at preparing the crane. We also ensured that at any point, our team would be allowed to stop work if they questioned any safety protocol to analyze and reset to mitigate any risk. I am happy to say that this job was completed with 100% success, thanks to the excellent work of our engineers, riggers, HSE and crane operators. Having planned this for weeks and finally completing the lift, all of us were overjoyed at the success of this prestigious project.”