ROTO on a barge for river wall maintenance

The ROTO 40.21 EVS is ideally suited to this application. Wide-spread stabilisers contain sensors for the innovative CSS automatic stability system, which continually reassesses machine stability in real-time.

Yarm, on the river Tees, regularly suffers from flooding. A 2 km stretch of river defences needs to be completely reconstructed. Access is all-but impossible from the town and road, and that leaves riverside access as the only practical approach.

Just to make things a little more interesting, there's restricted height under the bridge, so a normal mobile crane would be too big. And, a HIAB-style crane would be too slow, according to General Foreman, Tim Brownbridge, of Edmund Nuttall Ltd.

Their answer was a ROTO 40.21EVS, supplied from Ayrshire dealer Ramsey and Jackson, and serviced by Yorkshire Handlers.

Mounted upon a Uniflote barge system, under the captaincy of salvage expert bargemaster Barry Adams, this ROTO has to cope with strong currents and rapid rises in river level, as well as normal site operating problems.
Pallets of bricks and blocks, and half-metre skips of concrete are loaded downstream, on the opposite bank to the town, and then barged to the appropriate spot on the new defence wall perimeter. Up to 10 packs of bricks can be loaded at a time, or 6 tons of concrete placed every hour.

Tim says that the ROTO has the advantage of being light and very fast. He has three drivers trained on it and they're getting on fine.

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