Heavy lifting equipment

[DKinWA]

I got to participate in a salmon habitat restoration project that involved placing large woody debris (lwd) in a local river. Placing LWD in streams provides pool and riffle habitat that salmon need to both spawn and rear in. It's something I can talk about for hours and hours, so I won't put everyone to sleep and get to the point of my post. I hope to leave government in the near future and put my skills as a biologist and a contractor to work on restoration projects like this. So... here's some equipment pictures I thought some of you might enjoy. This first one is the staging area with the crew busy getting things ready.

[DKinWA]

Here's another one of the crew unloading the Chinook and getting ready to work.

[DKinWA]

Here's a big turn and the pilot lining up to set it down. These logs ranged in size from 2-5' in diameter and some of them had to be cut 2 or 3 times to get the weight down. The ship can haul something like 22,000 pounds and some of the loads were maximum weight.

[DKinWA]

One more big turn as it was being lowered into the river. The pictures don't look that impressive, but it's something you don't see every day. The rotor wash was amazing and I saw some alders snap in half and others blown over.

[RonG]

How things have changed..........when I was a kid in Maine on the opposite coast the beaver used to build dams on the streams and rivers.
Our game wardens used to dynamite the dams to put everything back to normal again,in fact I recall one getting killed in the process.
I never thought I would hear of anyone doing that intentionally,it is an interesting concept. Ron G

[xkvator]

1) how do the logs stay in place? won't they just float away?

2) can we all have a ride when you get your helicopter? :bouncegri

[digger242j]

when I was a kid in Maine on the opposite coast the beaver used to build dams on the streams and rivers. Our game wardens used to dynamite the dams to put everything back to normal again...

That brought to mind the widely circulated exchange of letters about the beaver dam that the state environmental guys had threatend to fine. I was surprised to find that it's actually true, as documented on the snopes (http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/dammed.htm) urban legends site. I don't want to hijack DK's thread and make it a furry little animal discussion, so I'll just leave the link.


Thanks for those pics. That'd be so cool to watch. I'm with xkvator--sign me up for a ride!

[DKinWA]

I'll never be able to afford to get into the flying part, that will definitely have to be contracted out to these guys. I almost fell over when someone told me they burn 400 gallons an hour :eek2 I'm pretty sure this is the Chinook (http://www.colheli.com/media/specification234lr.pdf) from their website that was on site. In addition to the pilots, there's a fair size crew that keeps everything in good running order. It looked like it'd be really interesting work and I can see where the travel would be a bonus.

Our knowledge of habitat has changed a lot over the years and we have a better understanding of how things work and where we went wrong. The logs we placed in jams aren't intended to stay indefinitely, but move as the river chooses. Everytime a piece of wood moves, it causes shuffling and sorting of gravel which breaks loose fine sediment and makes more gravel available for spawning adults. I wasn't intending to turn this into a salmon habitat thread, but I enjoy discussing it if folks want to PM me. I just thought it was a cool piece of heavy equipment folks might enjoy seeing.

[BRL]

We have an Off Topic Forum here, and that would be the perfect place to start a thread about the salmon habitat for those of us who might be interested in reading your perspective on the subject ;)

Thanks for sharing the pics, I love choppers and it's cool to see them doing work like this. Do you have any pics of the logs after they landed for us to see?

[norrodbh]

Cool, thanks to sharing !

Yeah.. about 400 gallons/hr, and about 10 hrs maintenance for each 1 hr of flight time

[DKinWA]

Between everyone taking pictures, I think we got something around 300. As soon as I get the pictures from the other folks, I'll post a few shots from the landing and the drop zones. I didn't ask about maintenance, but now I wished I did. A couple of folks have told me they spend as much time maintaining them as they do flying them. I can't imagine working on my excavator as much as I spend running it :)