Heavy rigging on industrial projects

Six months after the Riverbend outage, Kiera Lafontaine is back at Ironbridge Industrial's yard in Nisku, this time with a new line on her schedule: the heavy-lift crew for the fall turnaround at the Northgate Upgrader. The turnaround's biggest job is the replacement of one of the delayed coker drums, a steel vessel taller than a ten-storey building that weighs close to 300 t. Around that one lift sit dozens of smaller ones: heat exchanger bundles pulled and reset, a reboiler shell replaced, top heads and valves changed on the coker structure, and tube panels hoisted into a boiler at Riverbend on the same contract. Rosa Delgado, the general foreman, has put Kiera with Dale Whitford, who has rigged vessels for thirty years, and with Wade Kozak, Ironbridge's rigging superintendent, who will direct the big lifts.

Kiera learned the basics of rigging in her trades core course: slings, hitches, sling angles, shackles, hand signals and the idea of a lift plan. This course builds on that base and turns it toward the work boilermakers do: lifting, upending, jacking and setting vessels, drums, exchangers and boiler components that are heavy, awkward and often going into a plant that is still partly running. This first lesson describes how heavy rigging is organized on an industrial project: who does what, how lifts are classified, and why the boilermaker's part of the job is larger than it first appears.

What makes industrial rigging different

On a building site, most lifts are repetitive: bundles of steel, formwork, mechanical units, each similar to the last. Industrial rigging is different in several ways. The loads are one of a kind; a coker drum or a reactor is lifted once in its life, and nobody has handled one exactly like it before. The loads are heavy and often tall, so they must be upended from horizontal to vertical. The site is congested, with pipe racks, live process units and other cranes all around. The equipment being lifted is valuable, often worth millions of dollars and months of fabrication, and the plant may be losing production every day it is down. And much of the rigging is done in places a crane cannot reach: inside boilers, under pipe racks and inside structures where the boilermakers rig chain falls, jacks and skid tracks by hand.

Boilermakers take a large share of this work. On many turnarounds the crane company supplies the crane and the operator, and the boilermakers do everything below the hook: they rig the load, attach to the lugs and trunnions, set up tailing gear, guide the load, set it on its foundation or saddles, and release the rigging. In tight spaces they use their own equipment entirely. The trade's Red Seal and apprenticeship standards treat rigging as one of its core skills, alongside layout, fitting and welding.

The lift team

Every lift has a team, even a small one, and the bigger the lift the more formal the roles become. The same names appear in the standards, in the Alberta OHS Code and in the owner's site rules, although the titles vary from company to company.

The lift director, sometimes called the person in charge of the lift, has overall responsibility for the lift: the plan, the team, the decision to start and the decision to stop. On the Northgate drum lift this is Wade Kozak. The crane operator controls the crane and has the authority, and the duty, to refuse a lift he or she believes is unsafe. The riggers prepare and attach the rigging, and on a heavy lift at least one rigger is designated as qualified for that lift. The signal person directs the operator when the operator cannot see the load or the landing area, using hand signals or a radio. The lift engineer, who usually works for the crane company or an engineering firm, prepares the lift calculations and drawings for engineered lifts. The owner's lift coordinator, for Northgate a turnaround planner named Corinne Masse, approves lifts over the plant's equipment, coordinates the cranes with the rest of the turnaround and controls the permits.

In Alberta, the Code requires the employer to ensure that the crane operator is competent, and the province's apprenticeship and certification system requires a recognized trade certificate, or registration as an apprentice, to operate mobile cranes, boom trucks and tower cranes. The employer must designate the person who gives signals to the operator. The Code does not use the term qualified rigger, but it requires competent workers for rigging, and most owners, including Northgate, require riggers on heavy lifts to hold a rigging qualification from a recognized program.

Kiera's job on the team is the oldest one in rigging: she is a hand. She carries shackles, threads slings, holds a tagline, watches clearances and listens. Dale tells her that a good rigging hand learns two things before anything else: never to stand under a load or between a load and something solid, and that anyone on the team, including the newest apprentice, can call a stop.

Lift categories

Not every lift needs an engineer, and treating every lift the same would either bury the small ones in paperwork or leave the big ones under-planned. Owners and contractors therefore sort lifts into categories, each with its own level of planning. The details vary, but most systems use three levels.

The 75 percent line is not arbitrary. Alberta's Code requires a written lift calculation, with the load weight, the crane's configuration and the percentage of capacity, whenever a lift reaches 75 percent of the crane's rated capacity, and asks for a sketch of the crane's position and clearances. Northgate's procedure adds its own triggers on top of the law: any lift with two cranes, any load over 100 t, any load passing over equipment that contains hydrocarbons, any personnel platform and any lift within the power line approach zone is critical, whatever its percentage.

Wade has Kiera run the turnaround's list of planned lifts through the classification rules, so that she sees how a lift moves from one category to another. The list below is a small part of the real one.

# Lift categories for the Northgate turnaround (Northgate Upgrader rules, illustrative)
# name, load t, chart capacity at the planned radius t, cranes, over live plant, personnel
lifts = [
    ("exchanger bundle to laydown", 18.4, 62.0, 1, False, False),
    ("reboiler shell onto saddles", 41.0, 78.5, 1, True, False),
    ("coker drum top head", 24.0, 29.5, 1, False, False),
    ("new coker drum", 306, 420, 2, False, False),
    ("work basket on the drum deck", 0.9, 12.0, 1, False, True),
]
for name, load, cap, cranes, live, people in lifts:
    pct = 100 * load / cap
    why = []
    if pct >= 75: why.append(f"{pct:.0f} % of chart")
    if cranes > 1: why.append("two cranes")
    if live: why.append("over live equipment")
    if people: why.append("personnel")
    if load >= 100: why.append("heavy load")
    if why:
        cat = "CRITICAL"
    elif pct >= 50:
        cat = "PLANNED"
    else:
        cat = "ROUTINE"
    print(f"{name:<29} {pct:5.1f} % of chart  {cat:<8} {', '.join(why)}")

exchanger bundle to laydown    29.7 % of chart  ROUTINE  
reboiler shell onto saddles    52.2 % of chart  CRITICAL over live equipment
coker drum top head            81.4 % of chart  CRITICAL 81 % of chart
new coker drum                 72.9 % of chart  CRITICAL two cranes, heavy load
work basket on the drum deck    7.5 % of chart  CRITICAL personnel

Only one lift on the list is routine. The reboiler shell is at only half of the chart, but it passes over a live line, so it is critical. The coker drum top head is light compared with the drum, but the crane chosen for it is small for the radius, and at 81 percent of chart it needs a lift calculation by law. The new coker drum is under 75 percent, yet it is the most critical lift of the turnaround, because it uses two cranes and weighs over 300 t. The work basket is tiny, but it carries people. Kiera's lesson from the exercise is that a lift's percentage of chart is only one of the things that make it dangerous.

Where heavy lifts go wrong

Dale has seen several heavy lifts go wrong, and he tells Kiera that none of them failed because of something nobody could have known. The causes repeat. A load weighed more than the drawing said, because of internals, refractory, residue or water nobody accounted for. The centre of gravity was in a different place from where it was assumed, so the load tilted when it left the ground and the slings took loads they were not chosen for. The crane was set on ground that could not carry the outrigger or track loads. The radius grew during the lift as the load swung out, taking the crane past its chart. Wind caught a large, light load. Two cranes were not kept in step. Signals were misunderstood. Somebody stood where they should not have been.

Every one of those causes has a lesson in this course. Lesson 2 covers weights and centres of gravity, lesson 3 the rigging between the load and the hook, lessons 4 to 6 the crane, its chart and the ground under it, lessons 7 to 9 tandem lifts, upending, jacking and rigging by hand, lesson 10 signals and the weather, and lesson 11 the critical lift plan that ties them together. The capstone in lesson 12 follows the Northgate coker drum from the laydown yard to its foundation.

The rigging loft and the gear

Ironbridge keeps its rigging gear in a loft at the yard: wire rope slings from small chokers to 76 mm diameter grommets, synthetic roundslings, alloy chain slings, shackles up to 85 t capacity, spreader bars and lifting beams, beam clamps, chain falls, lever hoists, hydraulic jacks, cribbing, skid track and a load cell. Every item has an identification tag, a rated capacity and an inspection record. Before a job, the rigging foreman pulls the gear for each lift from the loft, checks it and logs it out to the job; after the job, it comes back for inspection. Gear that is damaged, missing its tag or overdue for inspection goes in a red-tagged cage and does not leave the yard.

Kiera spends part of her first week in the loft with Dale, going through the gear for the Northgate lifts. He shows her how to read the tags, how to match a shackle to a sling eye, and how the heavy equipment differs from the small gear she used in her core course: the shackles are too heavy to lift by hand, the grommets are handled with a forklift, and the lifting beam for the coker drum arrives on its own truck. Heavy gear is still inspected the same way, against the same removal criteria, before every use.

The plan, the meeting and the stop

Every lift starts with a plan, scaled to its category, and ends with a debrief. In between there is one more step that Dale considers the most important: the meeting at the crane before the lift, where the lift director goes through the plan with everyone involved. The operator confirms the configuration and the chart; the riggers confirm the gear; the signal person confirms the signals and the radio channel; the spotter confirms the exclusion zone. Anyone who is not sure of their part says so, and the lift waits until they are.

The other step is the stop. On every lift, any member of the team who sees something wrong can stop the work, and the operator must respond to a stop signal from anyone. At Northgate the stop is a standing rule written on the back of every lift plan: if the load does something unexpected, or someone is where they should not be, or the plan no longer matches what is happening, stop, make it safe and work it out before going on.