Moving Heavies

Woker Freight Services attend to another abnormal shipment of six  777D off highway dump trucks recently. The disassembled trucks were shipped from Chennai, India on board the Atlantic Dawn and were imported in 12 abnormal shipment loads. The largest pieces comprised buckets each loaded with four tyres. Because of their size and weight (30.3 tons each) the buckets were transported on six low-bed trailers. The other six loads included the chassis (at a hefty 27.7 tons each and transported on 6 semi-trailers), wheel axles, cabins, rims and metal crates that where transport on a link and a few semi-trailers.

WFS’ services on this shipment included customs clearance, port and shipping line release, transport from the port to the client’s yard in Walvis Bay and the crane hire/forklift hire to off-load the cargo from the trucks. According to Servaas de Villiers the entire process went as smooth as expected safe fro a few hiccups. “One of the challenges was the availability of suitable trucks. We had to use five different transporters to assist with the local transport. The vessel arrived on a Sunday and special arrangements had to be made for the offload. Abnormal cargo has to be loaded from the vessel directly onto trucks as heavy cargo is not allowed to be staged on the quayside,” he said.

“So the 12 trucks had to be in port on the Sunday evening ready to load the cargo when discharged from the vessel. The last piece was off-loaded early Monday morning around 02:30 am! The trucks had to remain 09:00 as we had to arrange for customs to be present at the south gate to check the cargo while they exited the port. We also had to arrange an escort by the traffic department for the trucks up to the off-loading point,” added de Villiers.

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