Waterfront Friends

I went to Starbucks today and met some longshoremen I know, including a Superintendent who just got suddenly fired from Centennial Dock and is probably coming back to work as an ordinary longshoreman. When I asked why he got fired, he said it was his refusal to perform fellatio on a certain waterfront executive whose genitalia he described, indicating the size with his fingers. He continued the metaphor, alluding to others who sucked AND swallowed. He is really quite a nice fellow, and not a person I even consider crude, but that is the way people talk in our industry. After a bit more conversation, I said that my son had cautioned me that I would have to modify the way I express myself when I try to make new friends who have never worked on the docks.

One of the dockers has a relative who failed the written test for prospective longshoremen - this despite being the proud holder of a B. Com degree! Lots of candidates have not passed the written, mainly because they can't do metric conversion and long division. I think our schools are doing a disservice to their pupils and to the country by letting students advance who have not mastered grade school mathematics. Many kids who can learn this stuff do not, just because there is no real consequence for not getting it. Perhaps there should be a standard math test and those who don't pass it have to do an extra remedial class or something.

In case you think this is not important for longshoremen, consider the following simple problem: The Safe Working Load of the lifting gear is 5000 lbs, so how many 35 kg objects can it safely pick up at one time? This sort of thing has to be figured out quickly, on dark, rainy docks. And lots of accidents have happened because people got it wrong.

Brazilian Granite and Chinese Pipe

This week I was unloading Brazilian granite blocks from the Westfield at Lynnterm East. I thought Canada had lots of granite of our own, but I soon saw that it comes in many different colors and textures - just these stones from Brazil were different shades of green, black, brown and honey; and Googling I found that red, pink etc can be obtained from places such as Saudi Arabia and India. Looking at the blocks (check the photo), I admired the precision drilling of the quarrymen who drilled the holes for the explosive that broke them free from the quarry. My colleagues are landing the block on timbers called "dunnage", so that they can get the slings free again, and to hold up the block so a forklift can get its tines under. When you order a counter top or tombstone from a Canadian stone company, remember that people drilled and blasted in some far-off quarry, seamen sailed and longshoremen loaded-unloaded it.
Seeing that the next hatch was unloading pipe, I went to look at the tags, thinking that it would be Brazilian too. Much to my surprise, the pipe came from China, as most of our pipe imports do. My guess is that the Westfield took on a cargo of soybeans for China in Vitoria, as well as granite for Canada in hold #1; unloaded the soy in China and filled the aft holds with pipe for Canada.

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.