Depending on your construction project, the weight you have to lift can be varied. The heavier the object you must lift, the more you need to ensure the correct equipment to safely complete the process. Many risks come with lifting heavy items, but having the experience, supervision, and sufficient training can make it a much safer procedure.
Health & Safety
It is absolutely crucial for you to ensure no lifts are completed which are deemed unsafe; companies should never promise a lift which they can’t safely complete.
6 Heaviest Objects Ever Lifted
If your lifting feels impossible, we can assure you there is a solution. The following examples show extraordinary feats throughout history in the lifting industry. These logistical successes show what can be achieved when the right people and proper planning are used. You may have heard of some of these famous construction stories, and they are worth talking about!
Cape York Meteorite
How do you go about moving a 58-ton meteorite? Perhaps you should ask Robert Peary. The large space object was discovered as part of many fragments of a fallen asteroid dating back thousands of years. The large rock was found a few miles east of Cape York, Greenland, and later transported to New York. It has been displayed in the American Museum Of Natural History, supported by the underground bedrock.
Gullfaks C
The Gullfaks oil field sits in the North sea off the coast of Norway. Made up of three parts, the Gullfaks C was the final component completed in 1989. Its total weight is between 1.4 and 1.5 million tons, and it stands at a lofty 380m tall. The installation of Gullfaks C made it the heaviest man-made object ever to be moved. It has a storage capacity of 2 million crude oil barrels, adding to its weight.
Saturn V Rocket
During the Great Space Race, the USA commissioned NASA to design and build the Saturn V rocket to send the first people to the moon. Each rocket engine weighed over 500 tons, and there were three in total! This led to logistics issues, as they were too big and heavy to be transported by road. Instead, they had to be moved by the USNS Point Barrow military ship through the Panama Canal. The Saturn V is still the most significant and heaviest spacecraft ever to be operated.
Prehistoric Boulder
Artists go to great lengths to complete a masterpiece, but sculptor Michael Heizer went to another level. He is the designer of the famous 2012 sculpture Levitated Mass on display in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Heizer discovered a boulder near his home in the Nevada desert and had an idea. His vision was to create a walkway and place a boulder above it so that visitors could walk underneath for a fully immersive experience.
A unique route had to be calculated to transport the 340-ton rock to the museum. The total journey was 105 miles and carried out by Emmert International, a company that specialises in moving heavy objects.
Hotel Montgomery
This is the most unusual lifting task we have come across in history. The hotel was built in 1911 in San Jose, California, and was set to be demolished to expand a neighboring hotel. However, the structure was deemed too much historical significance to the city, so an alternative plan was carried out. The San Jose Redevelopment Agency paid a total of $8.6million to have the historical hotel moved just 187ft south of its original location! At the time, this was the fifth heaviest building relocation.
Statue Of Liberty
The USA’s most famous monument, the Statue Of Liberty, stands proudly in New York City at a whopping 305 feet tall. However, did you know that the significant American landmark was built on the other side of the Atlantic ocean? French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi completed the design in 1886. The structure took four years to build and then stood on display in Paris. The entire statue had to be disassembled and transported from Paris by boat and then reconstructed on Liberty Island. It was packed into 214 wooden crates then shipped to the USA.
How To Ensure You Are Lifting Safely
The key to the success of these record-breaking lifting feats is thorough planning and consideration of safety in the process. All heavy lifting should be carried out with caution and by a team of experienced individuals using the equipment and safety measures. Without this, you risk injury to yourself and others or fatality in the worst case. Construction sites are the greatest contributor to injury in the workplace. You can implement specific practices to ensure that you stay safe while lifting heavy loads.
Lifting tools such as the Clad Boy and Rota Boy can make this process much safer. Our 4 Cladding team will ensure that anyone who uses our services is fully trained on each piece of machinery to minimise the risk of harm. You can arrange for your employee training and hire any piece of equipment here.