Every so often, Omega Morgan gets the opportunity to help redefine how things are done in the heavy equipment moving and industrial solutions industry. When a roadblock gets in the way, or when schedules have customers in an impossible situation, our team rises to the challenge every time–even if that means innovating a brand-new solution to get the job done well and on schedule.

A renewable energy company was facing one such challenge. They were already on a tight deadline to get wind turbine generator (WTG) components up to a wind farm in Alberta, Canada. The major problem? There were multiple wind projects taking place at the same time and along the exact same route. This would mean massive trucking delays and a guarantee of missing the scheduled deadline completely.

Omega Morgan knows that schedule is everything in the transportation industry. Our Portland-based specialized transportation services crew, crane services crew and millwright team all stepped up–in partnership with several other transportation and logistics companies–to help create a unique solution. If trucking would cause massive delays, then we would need to bypass that route entirely.

By Land and By Sea

Omega Morgan proposed an alternative method for transportation: barging the WTG components to the Port of Lewiston in Lewiston, ID (avoiding trucking on the heavily-congested Oregon and Washington routes) and then trucking them up to their final destination in Alberta.

This meant developing an entirely new means of transportation for components coming into the Pacific Northwest. It was a massive coordination effort, involving scheduling and communicating with all of the parties involved. Since shipments were coming into the Port of Lewiston from both the Port of Longview and the Port of Vancouver in Washington, our crews secured and provided suitable equipment to transport, offload and store the components from the lower Columbia River to the Port of Lewiston.

All in all, there were 12 voyages that headed up river, and our crews prepared and adhered to all 12 of the barge stow and lashing plans.

Getting Things Organized

After the components had made their way up the river to the Port of Lewiston, our crews offloaded the components from the barge and shuttled them to a laydown area.

Our crane services team used two 220T Crawler cranes to offload the WTG components and two 110T Crawler cranes to offload and stage the components at the wind distribution center, as well as load out the trucks.

Planning at Warp Speed

A project of this scale and complexity would normally take three to four months to plan. Our client did not have that time, so the Omega Morgan team got a solid plan together for the safe transportation of these components in just five weeks. Overall, this project required a massive amount of dedicated engineering time–over 200 hours worth–to complete.

This was the first project of this kind to be embarked upon in the Pacific Northwest. Even so, the project was a great success, and our customer was extremely happy with the end result. Several identical projects got started around the same time — Omega Morgan is proud to report that our project is the first to be completed.

This was a true team effort, and we are appreciative and grateful for our crews and the fantastic shipping and logistics companies we had the opportunity to partner with on this endeavor.