Guest Blog from Rich

Ok, so I was asked to write a guest blog. I'm being forced into the 21st century here.

So I thought I would show what I did today. This is a picture of the first of my four coke drums. Fabricated in Belgium, this giant vessel came over on a ship, and was then transferred to a barge at New Orleans. It came up the Mississippi to a terminal near the refinery. Here it is being offloaded using a self propelled 16-axle transporter, rolling off the barge across a heavy-duty ramp and onto a landing we built up. The river was high and rising today; it's been a challenge to design for offloading with all the changing river conditions we've experienced in the last 2 months (very high levels, fast rises and falls, swift current, major flooding in the area). This brute weighs 1,200,000 pounds empty. It's 31 feet in diameter! My boss asked me if it would float, if we dropped it. I responded that it would float, downstream, along with all our careers! One down, three more to offload. We're still waiting on a permit to begin construction, so for now we will just store these vessels at this terminal.

There you have it, my first blog entry. Only an engineer could love it.

Rich