Customer Success Stories : A Little Piece of Canada - Scott Van Keppel, LLC
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Scott Van Keppel, LLC

A LITTLE PIECE OF CANADA IN THE TROPICS

Volvo is there as ship delivers 30,000 tons of Canadian armor stone to Caribbean island

AULDS COVE, Nova Scotia - Nearly 2,000 miles separate the Canadian province of Nova Scotia from the Caribbean's tropical island of Barbados. Still it's now possible to step from the warm sands of Barbados right onto the rocks of Nova Scotia.

Recently, several Nova Scotia firms came together to move 30,000 tons of armor rock from the province's hard rock quarries to Barbados, where it is being used to construct breakwaters that will provide coastal protection to the island's shores.

R.A. Murray International Ltd. received a contact from the government of Barbados to provide 30,000 tons of Nova Scotia's prized armor stone as part of a government sponsored program to enhance the shoreline protection to the Caribbean island.

"That's a lot of rock," said Rick Murray, president of the Halifax-based engineering & procurement firm. So much rock, in fact, that it took three Nova Scotia quarries to fill the order.

Ask Murray and he will be able to state exactly how many boulders were sent to Barbados - 27,000 - and how much each weighed - between 1/2 ton and 4 tons. That's because each of the rocks was inventoried and logged.

Engineers were onsite for about 40 days measuring and marking the boulders they wanted taken from Canada to Barbados. "They were very particular," Murray said. "There wasn't any guesswork involved."

Rock was pulled from hard rock quarries operated by Martin- Marietta, J&T Van Zutphen Construction and S.W. Weeks Construction. It was loaded onto a ship in Mulgrave, from where it set off on a voyage to Barbados, an island 400 miles off the northern coast of Venezuela.

The hard rock provided by Nova Scotia quarries is in demand around the globe for waterfront protection and breakwater construction.

The majority of the actual sorting and lifting of the rock was done by J&T Van Zutphen, which operates out of Port Hood, NS. Ted Van Zutphen, the firm's president, said his group had about five weeks to complete its part of the job. A job he said was made easier with the help of a Volvo EC290B excavator, on demo from Strongco Equipment- Dartmouth.

"It performed very well," Van Zutphen said of the EC290B, his first exposure to Volvo's B-Series excavators. Van Zutphen's operators used the EC290B - equipped with a bucket - to first pick and sort the boulders and later to unload the rocks from a flatbed in preparation for loading them onto the ship.

The project began with engineers from the Barbados government and R.A. Murray selecting and sorting the rocks according to specifications. Van Zutphen said his firm used three excavators with buckets attached and two wheel loaders to assist in the sorting operation.

According to Murray, much of the available rock - as high as 40% - was refused by the engineers, who were looking for boulders free of defects, such as blast fractures and crystallization.

Once all the rocks were selected, crews had just five days to load the ship. In order to meet that deadline, Van Zutphen said he had crews on the job around the clock loading between 200 to 300 tons of rock per hour.

"It was different," Van Zutphen said. "And, it was a challenge. But we got it done on schedule."

Actually, Murray reports the job was done ahead of schedule. "The loading was done in record time, and that allowed the ship to depart one day early," he said.

D.J. Campbell, of S.W. Weeks, said his firm had just taken delivery of a Volvo EC460B LC excavator on demo from Strongco Equipment - Dartmouth when he received a call from Van Zutphen.

"Ted was able to give them most of what they were looking for, but they were short on some of the sizes," Campbell said, noting that his firm provided about 5,000 tons of rock. "This job just happened to come around at the right time, just as we brought in the Volvo."

S.W. Weeks operators used the Volvo EC460B LC, equipped with a bucket, to sort rock in the quarry and to load boulders onto trucks.

"The operators were pretty impressed with the Volvo," Campbell said. "It was the combination of power, fuel economy and operator comfort that they really liked. And, they said it was real smooth."

Campbell added, "It's obvious that Volvo spent a lot of time talking to operators while they were designing that machine."

In the quarries, engineers measured, marked and logged each of the boulders that would be sent to Barbados, a total of 27,000 rocks. "It was quite a feat," Murray said, adding that the rocks were each marked and placed into one of three size categories: 1/2 to 1 ton, 2 to 3 tons, and 3 to 4 tons. Each category was represented by a uniquely colored mark to assist excavator operators who were loading the rock.

According to Murray, the engineers knew precisely what quantity and size of rocks they needed to complete the plans drawn for the Barbados job. "The rocks will be placed according to size in order to best break up the wave action and dissipate the wave's energy," he said.

Both Campbell and Van Zutphen were impressed by the engineers' precise measurements. Said Campbell, "They had it all drawn up and knew exactly what they needed for the job. It was almost like they were putting a puzzle together down in Barbados."

Campbell said he was particularly impressed by the loading operation at the dock.

"There were huge grapples on the ship that were used to pick up these enormous rocks and to load them onto the boat," he said. Because each boulder was marked with its weight, crane operators could easily pick the appropriately weighted rocks in order to balance the load on board the ship.

"Ted and his crew did a great job of filling that order," Murray said.

While the unloading in Barbados was made difficult due to a limited amount of space on the dock, Murray said the ship was emptied successfully by C.O. Williams Construction Ltd., and the armor rock now rests in a large stockpile on the Barbados coast. "You can't miss it," he said, adding that he expects the coastline protection project will take several years to complete.

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