Floating crane
The pig iron is shipped from Rio de Janeiro by the MV Yuanping Sea. This sea-going vessel is 200 metres long and 32 wide and has a draught of 12 metres. The ship loaded its cargo in the port of Rio de Janeiro, departing there on 3 October.
After arriving off the coast of Hoek van Holland, the vessel will drop anchor and wait for a favourable tide. The ship will be guided by the Harbour Coordination Centre and the pilots to a set of reserved buoys in Botlek, where it will be secured by the linesmen. After this, it’s the turn of ZHD Stevedores, the stevedoring firm with local offices in Dordrecht and Moerdijk. The company’s floating cranes can also be found moving through the port of Rotterdam.
Dico Regoord: “We will be using our self-propelled floating crane to unload the ship. We started preparing for this weeks ago. The ship has five holds and is carrying multiple payloads with different categories of pig iron. These orders will be divided up on board using so-called separations, which are made from boards or tarps. We prepared the actual unloading weeks earlier. We closely confer with Carbones beforehand. And together with the ship’s captain, we determine which orders for which clients need to be unloaded first and which can wait till the end.”
Sebastian Brunner adds: “Another unique feature of this shipment is that it includes different types of pig iron – all of high quality. You may not see it from the outside, but the various orders differ in terms of chemical composition. It can be quite a challenge to prevent these different categories from getting mixed up on board the vessel. There will always be hiccups in an operation of this size. For example, right now the water levels along the Rhine are too low for direct forwarding via inland shipping. That’s why we will be storing 18,000 tonnes of iron at ZHD Stevedores’s facilities in Dordrecht. From there, we can transport these orders by truck or inland vessel to our clients: foundries and steel manufacturers in Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, France and Belgium.”
Spectacular job
Dico Regoord on their partnership: “Carbones has been one of our clients for seven years now. We have the fleet of cranes required for an operation of this kind. Rotterdam is the perfect port to unload at for a project like this, thanks to the depth of its waterways, the freedom to handle cargo from buoys or dolphins and its range of distribution options. In projects like this, we need to be standing by 24 hours a day. It promises to become a very exciting and spectacular job for both of us: Carbones and ZHD!”