When it comes to big cargo, this Port can do!

The second shipment of several enormous pieces of equipment built in Japan and destined for Canada via record-setting rail shipments arrived in December aboard Fairlift, owned by Jumbo of Rotterdam.  Lake Superior Warehousing Co., Inc., offloaded 138 individual components from the Fairlift, seven of which weighed in excess of 500 tons. 

The Dutch vessel Fairlift discharges one of seven 500-ton cylinders.
The first shipment of 36 pieces, which arrived on Jumbo’s Stellanova in September, contained five that weighed more than 500 tons. 

The two shipments represented the largest multiple loads ever carried over U.S. and Canadian railways, according to Ed Clarke, Fluor Daniels Canada, Inc., the transportation contractor.  The equipment is being used for the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, an oil-sands mine, extraction and upgrading development in northern
Alberta.

Designated route

This wasn’t the only unusual cargo on the move through Lake Superior Warehousing near the end of the 2000 shipping season.  The Port has become the designated route for shippers of oversized cargo — a “can-do facility,” according to LSW President Gary Nicholson. 

November alone saw the company handle turbine generator equipment from Sweden destined for Chaska, Minnesota; large pieces of ductwork from Bremen, Germany, destined for Trimont, Minnesota; and an apron conveyor system manufactured in Bremen for a crane being built in Alberta.

[See related item, Page 11.]