Heavy Lift & Heavy Haul

Heavy Lift & Heavy Haul

Consider Becht’s Heavy Lift Division as “one-stop shopping” for all your crane consulting needs. We provide expertise in all areas of crane management.

Heavy Lift and Heavy Haul are two of the highest risk activities involved in capital projects and turnarounds – do you have the right competency on-site to assure these activities are completed without incident?

Becht brings decades of experience, helping assure safe transport and lifts of loads up to 2,000-tons. We have been involved in reviews of some of the largest lifts in the world and next-generation technology such as the GE Haliade-X  12 MW  800-foot tall wind generator with a 716-ton Nacelle and 350-ft long blades.

 

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Heavy Lift Planning

Crane Foundation

With all the tools available today, there is no reason to have a crane foundation problem or ground failure.

Our registered crane and rigging engineers will analyze your crane foundation design or develop a new one from scratch.

Rigging Points of Attachment

Don’t forget about the rigging points of attachment to the load. Our experts will model the lift lug/trunnion design for capacity and functionality, or design a totally new system.

We will assure the points of attachment have the required capacity and the load is balanced.

Lift and Transportation Studies

Will your contracted crane or heavy haul transporter be too big, too small? Will they fit in the restricted areas of your facility?

Let us confirm the crane and heavy haul units are right for the job. We will confirm the capacities, assure clearances to obstructions, select the size and type of equipment and finally go out to reputable contractors for competitive pricing.

Becht Heavy Lift specialists have extensive experience providing independent 3rd party cold eye reviews of engineered lift plans.  Reviews include ground bearing pressure & load distribution analysis, crane suitability, rigging assemblies and configuration, lift procedures, and personnel qualifications among other items.  Becht’s deliverable is a P.E. Stamped consolidated Heavy Lift Manual that is utilized during the heavy lift execution.

Heavy Lift Support

Heavy Lift Field Supervisors

A well-designed lift plan can still be executed with errors in the field!

Becht fills this void by maintaining onsite presence through crane erection and lift activities with a highly experienced field supervisor. Becht’s field supervisors ensure that a safe lift occurs in accordance with the approved lift plans while validating compliance with current regulations and the Client’s Crane & Rigging policies.

Below you can find a picture of a 1500-ton hydrocracker installation. Becht’s crane experts provided field oversight for three installations at different plants for the same client. Although the reactors were identical, the logistics at each location presented significant challenges for transporting through the plant and lifting while the adjacent units were in operation.

Turnaround Support

We can assist you with turnaround crane planning and provide expert coordinators to assure the cranes are effectively utilized while approving and overseeing critical lifts.

Legal Assistance

Crane and Rigging Policies

Are you in compliance with all local, state and federal crane regulations?

With the implementation of a new OSHA Crane Rule in 2010 many companies are realizing their crane and rigging policies are not compliant.  Becht’s Heavy Lift team has decades of experience in the heavy lift industry and is integrally involved in applicable industry groups such as the Specialized Carriers & Rigging Association (SC&RA) and the Crane and Derrick Advisory Committee to OSHA (C-DAC).  Becht supports both corporate and site updates to the Crane & Rigging policies.

If you don’t have a policy in place, we can work with you to draft a new policy that is user friendly but still keeps you in compliance.

Further, we can provide site training on crane & rigging policy roll-outs.  A few examples are listed below:

  • Valero Energy
  • PetroLogistics
  • LyondellBasell
  • HollyFrontier
  • Marathon

 

Expert Witness

At Becht, we greatly prefer to be involved prior to heavy lift execution projects to better follow our mission – “We Prevent Problems.”

We hope you never find yourself in a position to need an expert witness but there are times when we are engaged after an incident has already occurred – to support crane accident investigation and determination of root cause.  In this case, we bring a fully independent viewpoint to your investigation and incorporate our full engineering services (e.g. mechanical analysis) into the effort.  Additionally, Becht frequently is engaged on engineered support for next steps (e.g. how to safely complete the project post incident).  We can support expert witness work when required.  A few examples of crane accident investigation support are listed below:

  • Major Gulf Coast Crane Failure – Becht determined the root cause for the collapse of a 2500-ton crane that fell inside the refinery and made recommendations to prevent this from reoccurring.
  • 200-ton Crawler Crane Loss of Backward Stability in the Chicago area – Becht was engaged to determine the root cause of the crane boom collapse where the 300ft boom toppled into a live unit.

Heavy Lift Safety

Crane Competent Person Training

Federal OSHA requires all persons performing crane related responsibilities to meet the definition of a competent person.

Becht can provide comprehensive training to assure your staff has the knowledge to ask the right questions and what to look for when a crane is working on your site. You don’t have to be a certified crane operator or rigger to oversee these activities. However, you must be competent to effectively oversee what those people are doing. OSHA has defined responsibilities for the controlling entity, meaning the facility/property owners. Such as, providing allowable ground bearing information to the crane contractor. You will learn how to interpret federal and local crane laws, read a crane capacity chart, evaluate rigging systems and how to fill out and approve a critical lift plan, along with many other industry best practices.

Becht has standard, proven training that we can fit for purpose to your site needs. We can provide one to three-day training on Crane Competent Person Training – this training is meant to increase the competency of site personnel including safety, operations, projects and others. We have found that an increased awareness of personnel surrounding a heavy lift will significantly improve the chances of catching a misstep such as line of sight issues. Becht can additionally support roll-out of updated crane & rigging policies in conjunction with our Crane Competent Person Training. A few examples are listed below:

  • LyondellBasell
  • Marathon
  • Valero
  • Phillips 66

Crane Safety Audits

A notable safety assessment was done for the new Panama Canal where they were using over 50-tower cranes and had suffered a fatality due to a mechanical malfunction on one of the tower cranes that had been converted to position a concrete conveyor belt assembly. Becht determined the root cause of the failure and made recommendations to improve over twenty mechanical deviancies on the crane fleet.

Let Becht Turn Your Problem
Into Peace of Mind