Trees to Pulp to Paper - Loading Pulp on Ships

Squamish Dock, owned by Star Shipping of Bergen, Norway, primarily ships Canadian pulp to other countries. Everybody knows that paper is made from trees, but before wood can be made into paper it must be made into pulp, which is packaged in bales the size of a smallish cardboard box. These bales are bundled 4, 6, or 8 together with lifting wires to form units which are unloaded from rail cars at the dock, stacked in the warehouses with clamp trucks, and then conveyed to the ship on double-wide trailers accomodating 15 units to a side. The tractor driver has disengaged his machine from the trailer and moved safely out of the way while the lift is performed. The ship in the photo can load only 15 units at a lift, but some new vessels take both sides of the trailer (30 units) at once. The dock crew, standing on the portable ramps (the green things), fastens the hooks from the gantry crane head (the blue thing) to all the lifting wires to allow the units to be hoisted, but the hooks are released by pneumatic remote control once the pulp is stowed in the hold. The longshoremen rarely enter the hold during this type of loading except to inflate large air bags to fill gaps in the stow and keep the cargo from shifting.