1 mins
13 WOLFF CRANES
ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF WOLFF
A new US military hospital is under construction in Weilerbach near Kaiserslautern in Rhineland-Palatinate, close to Ramstein Airbase in Germany.
The new building has a curved facade, designed to resemble the United States flag. It will have more than 4,000 rooms, 120 treatment rooms, and nine operating theatres, spread over an area of approximately 90,000 square meters. Once completed, it is claimed that it will be the largest US-military hospital outside of the US.
A construction consortium named ARGE US-Klinikum Weilerbach, comprising Ed. Züblin AG and Gilbane, are working on this project with the help of 13 Wolff cranes.
“Even before the crane foundations could be planned, numerous bureaucratic hurdles had to be overcome,” says work planner Daniel Rüttinger, who is responsible for process planning and construction operations at Ed. Züblin AG.
During the preparation for construction, one of the challenges that had to be addressed was the foundation of the cranes. “Due to the highly heterogeneous subsoil, consisting of several soil layers, exploratory drilling was carried out at each crane site,” explains Rüttinger.
The buoyancy caused by rising groundwater, existing pipes, and the compatibility of the concrete foundations with naturally occurring radon in the ground also had to be considered when laying the crane foundations.
To cover all sections of the building, some cranes had to be positioned at low points, where foundations up to 2.4m high were set up. Since these areas will be backfilled with soil during construction, the lower tower sections were enclosed in crane shoring.
This allowed the surrounding building foundation components to be erected, the working area to be backfilled, and the crane to be completely dismantled later.
ARGE is deploying cranes with lifting capacities of between 6.0 and 16.5 tons and peak load capacities of between 1.8 and 7.0 tons. The tallest cranes stand on towers almost 70m tall. IC