Stay in Houston

Stay in Houston

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This is what the inside of the barge looks like when it is mostly empty. For the paper wrapped coils, there is a lot of labelling and marking to do so that a team of four us go down and do most of that with each of us doing one step of the process. We will do the whole load of about 200 coils in a couple of hours. It is dark at the far end, but there is still enough light to read the labels.
Here is the front end loader. We also use it when there aren't any barges to unload to collect the wood checks (to the right of the lumber we collected above) and trash from trash barrels around the facility.
Here is a tractor trailer ready to be loaded with steel coils. It wold take only six of the smaller coils or just one large coil (like those behind it) to be the full load for the rig.
Here is the crane as seen from the hill just above the lumber storage area. The low capacity hook (two cables) is about half way down while the high capacity hook (four cables) is all the way up. Behind the crane are two barges. The one to the left is empty while the one to the right is loaded. It is about six to eight feet lower in the water when loaded.
On that same hill are railroad tracks and a second crane where they can also unload and load rail cars. In this picture you can see three rail cars to be unloaded beside the second crane. The covers are lifted off by the crane which can then unload the coils of steel. In this picture the crane has the set of four cables and hooks that are used to lift off the covers. To the right of the crane are bars and pipes of steel that seem to stored in this area.
That crane can also go forward onto a platform right next to the water (shown here) to unload barges with ore and such. Here the crane is hooked up to the attachment for getting ore. The crane on the lower level had used a set of cables with four hooks to lift off the turquoise cover from the yellow barge to the left. There is an ore tractor trailer to the right of the crane.
First they just scoop the ore out. Then when there aren't any piles of ore in the center of the barge, they used the lower crane to lower a small Bobcat (fron t end loader) into the barge to push the ore into a pile in the center. That ore is chromium ore and is suprisingly heavy. Two people were also lowered into the barge to shovel the ore from the very edges. I heard that chromium ore like that is over a dollar a pound and it doens't take much to have a pound.
Outside the warehouse is a trailer where they have their administrative office; that is wear I drop off my time sheet when I get there. There is another trailer inside the warehouse which is the break area and bathrooms. The crew is very friendly and works together very well, everyone pitching in as necessary. It seems that everyone starts out as a temp for at least three months before they are hired on permanently. We have a break at 9:30AM as that is when the vendor selling snacks and such arrives. We also have lunch from 12PM to 12:30PM (it is unpaid). We often skip the afternoon break if there is work until 5PM but if there is no work we hang out in the break area from 4PM to 5PM. They usually play dominoes in the break area.