Equipment and Expertise

Watco’s recipe for transloading success

On any given day at Watco’s Greens Port Industrial Terminal (GPIT) docks, you might see a 400,000-lb. locomotive high in the air. Or a 45-foot dive boat suspended overhead and being ‘walked’ by a crawler crane to an outbound cargo ship.

The stevedoring and other activity making up material handling at GPIT offers a window into Watco’s terminal and ports, where experienced team members with specialized equipment skillfully handle project and other cargo.

The 45-foot dive boat, by the way, weighed about 35 tons. It was transloaded from an ocean vessel to a cradle on our dock for a couple of days before being loaded onto another ship. The Watco team used a 300-ton-capacity Link-Belt crawler crane and created what’s known as a Christmas tree rigging of spreader bars and slings to lift the boat and move it down the dock to the outbound vessel.

The locomotive came in by rail with the Watco switching team spotting it on the dock. To load the GECX 1025 for its destination, Watco personnel operated the cranes on the ship, which was bound for a port in Ecuador and eventually the Cerrejón Railway in Columbia.

GPIT General Superintendents Eddie Najera and Ruben Powell are in charge of seven Vessel Superintendents who control the loading and discharging operations on GPIT’s five deep-water docks. “We touch base with the ship lines and customers to do the logistics,” says Najera, “depending on what kind of cargo we will discharge or load for them.”

The cargo might be a massive steam turbine generator from Poland, offloaded from a 150-meter cargo ship and transloaded directly to a Louisiana-bound barge. Or steel anchor chains, each over 200 feet long and weighing over 55 MT (300 lbs. per foot), moved in bundles with a Link-Belt 348 Hylab crawler crane. It might be wind turbine components, like towers or blades. “Last month, we moved a little over 200 blades into the terminal by ship, and shipped them out by truck and rail,” says Wind Manager Andre Wheaton. The average blade is 62 meters, or over 200 feet, moved using the terminals’ Liebherr harbor cranes.

This is just a small sampling of the activity at GPIT, where crawler cranes, harbor cranes, reach stackers, top loaders, and more are at work throughout not only the docks but elsewhere at the 735-acre terminal. And variations of this activity are playing out at scale every day throughout the Watco network. At the Osceola Marine Terminal on the Mississippi River in Arkansas, what is thought to be the world’s largest model of material handleris assembled and ready for operation. With a reach of more than 130 feet and powered by a 500kW electric engine, the Sennebogen 895 E will move inbound raw steel commodities and outbound steel coils.

Team members at nearly 100 transload, wind, and marine terminals and ports are operating hundreds of cranes, forklifts, excavators, dozers, and other equipment assets (plus additional equipment brought in as needed) to handle all types of project and general, bulk, liquid, wheeled, and other cargo.

It’s apparent that when Watco says “we can handle it,” we mean it.