KNUCKLE BOOMS Ӏ FLOATING FLEET INTERVIEW
to ensure they are safe and fit-for- purpose. Even though our cranes are not predominantly lifting people, we still stick to checking our crane boats once every six months as we believe this is best practice to ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of our crew and third parties that we work with. Alongside this, before going out to a
job, we will put together a Lift Plan. We use the ‘traffic light system’ which takes into consideration buoyancy of the boat taking part of the weight to help lower ground bearing pressures on the bed of the canal. We work closely with our navel architects to produce these calculations every time. Doing this means we know what we pressure we can safely exert on the ground and canal bed we’re working from, and determine how much we can lift under different configurations.
Who does service and maintenance on your crane boats? RS: We do the servicing and maintenance of our crane boats ourselves, as we have an experienced workshop team that are fully trained on all the equipment. We can also self-assess and repair our crane boats as we have two LOLER-qualified plant inspectors within our team, me being one of them, and carry a wide range of spare parts so our plant and machinery is always in tip top condition.
50 CRANES TODAY
As part of this, we have to maintain our qualifications by retaking the certification and training course once every five years.
How do you ensure the stability of the cranes/safety of the crew when lifting on water? Do you use any control systems / anti-tip technology? DH: To ensure the safety and stability of our crane boats we will calculate the ground bearing pressures when we are putting together our Lift Plan. Included within this is calculating water buoyancy, which in simple terms is looking at how stable the boat will be once it is jacked up a certain percentage out of the water, and with the weight of the vessel then transferred instead to the stability legs. Once all rigged and set up, we will perform a test lift to ensure that everything is safe.
Do you have plans to further expand your boat-mounted knuckle boom crane feet? DH: We do, yes! We have already ordered two more cranes this year, so our fleet will expand to 23 crane boats overall. We are seeing the need to invest because there’s an increasing demand for the hire out of our crane boats, whether that is from mobilising them to repair canal lock gates caused by accidents from more leisure boaters or maintaining sections
of the waterways caused by weather changes and land slips and leaks. We have also seen more long-term
hire of our crane boats to help with major infrastructure repair projects, such as maintaining the underside of bridges and concrete abutments that hold up sections of highways and flyovers.
What’s next for The Rothen Group in terms of crane technology on boats? Any innovations in the pipeline? DH: Innovation is always top of mind when we look at our next crane boat, and indeed, look back at our existing fleet, too. One particular piece of innovation that we are particularly proud of is our telescopic stabilising legs, which we trialled with our latest crane boat, the Brunel. These are extendable legs, so that they can be shortened and lengthened as needed to the depth of the canal. The key benefits here are time and labour saving – instead of needing two people to lift what is quite a heavy bit of kit we can simply extend the legs and stick a pin in at the desired length. We have now retrofitted all our crane boats with these telescopic stabilising legs seeing how successful they were.
For more information about The Rothen Group, please visit:
www.therothengroup.co.uk
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