Tadano CC 68.1250-1 and CC 38.650-1 lift steel bridge sections at the Porto di Prà shipyard

Vernazza Autogru relies on tried-and-true crawler crane duo for demanding lifts.

When it comes to lifting and moving particularly heavy loads, the team at Italian crane service provider Vernazza Autogru is especially fond of the powerful lattice boom crawler cranes made by Tadano – no surprise then that this included lifting two bridge sections with a weight of 500 and 290 tonnes for a bridge structure at the Porto di Prà shipyard on behalf of shipbuilding company Fincantieri.

The loads consisted of bridge sections built with a composite construction made of steel girders and a concrete deck on top. These sections had to be lifted onto pillars with utmost precision. “These demanding lifts needed cranes that would not just be able to lift extremely heavy loads, but also to move them while suspended in the air. And to tell you the truth, the only candidates qualified for the job were our two Tadano lattice boom crawler cranes,” explains Marco Galli, who was responsible for the project.

Before the actual job could be carried out, however, the two cranes had to be transported from Vernazza’s headquarters in Vado Ligure to the work site in Porto di Prà and set up there. Once the machines were at their destination, the crane experts at Vernazza took a mere eight days to set up the CC 68.1250-1 and five to set up the CC 38.650-1. 

“However, we had to relocate the large CC 68.1250-1 during the work and completely dismantle it in order to rebuild it elsewhere. The assembly-friendly design of the Tadano CC cranes was very helpful, so we were able to master that particular challenge without issue,” reports Marco Galli, who also finds the tremendous reliability and extremely sensitive maneuverability of Tadano CC lattice boom crawler cranes to be invaluable.