FARMINGTON – The final four pieces of a huge, 440-ton crane that will be assembled atop the Kibby Range in northern Franklin County to install 44 wind power turbines, ambled through town at midday today.
General contractors of the Kibby wind power project, Reed & Reed, Inc. of Woolrich, ordered its second Manitowoc M-16000, a 440-ton crawler crane designed especially for erecting wind turbines, from a manufacturing company in Wisconsin.
Eighteen tractor trailers have been hauling the parts of the $4 million crane from Wisconsin across the country to Maine. Most of the parts have already been delivered to the Kibby Mountain site, but the four tractor trailer loads of the most sensitive parts of the monster crane, that were stored for the winter at Reed and Reed, were transported today.
The 932,000-pound crane’s two tracks were carried on two trucks (see photo below), a third carried the frame, and the final truck brought the crane’s upper works. The crane has a reach of 317 feet in the air for assembly of the turbine’s towers and blades that, once installed, is 410 feet tall, from base to blade tip.
Last year, Reed & Reed’s first crawler crane, the same model heading to Kibby, was used to erect 38 wind turbines at the Stetson Mountain Wind Project in Danforth, Maine.
Using the crane, which will “crawl” along Kibby’s ridgeline to erect the 44 Vestas V-90 turbines, each of which is expected to produce 3 megawatts of electricity when the project is completed in 2010.
