Charles Gallup

We shipped half a million pounds of equipment to Galveston Texas this week. Figgerin out how and where it should be placed on a truck has been a nightmare in the past. The last truck just left... we loaded 12 trucks in two days. A new record. It was mercifully uneventful as each crew member had a simple print out in "Shading". Guess work was minimized and productivity was maximized. My crew loves to get things done! PowerCADD and DesignWorkshop helped me get there. On a hunch these programs would serve us, I incorporated PowerCADD and DesignWorkshop as part of our organizational plan for shipping. My drawing experience is limited. I used PowerCADD to make certain shapes and extruded them to the lengths I needed. My drawing isn't "finished" or "pretty". The point I want to make is my company is using these two programs to help us get the job done. Frankly, we will try many things... once... we use what works and abandon what doesn't. PowerCADD/WildTools and DesignWorkshop has made my job far easier and to date has saved my company $12,000.00 just in shipping expenses alone! The task at hand is laying two power cables and one fibre optic cable together. The two barges will be lashed end to end. We will be working in four feet of water. 17 people working in unison are required before we can bury one foot of cable. The entire cable route is 3 miles from Galveston Island to the mainland. We will have a crew of 30. Two cable reels depicted in the center of each barge weigh 450 tons each and are enroute from Norway. They will be lifted by crane and placed on location and welded down. The Capra's will then be located and serve to route the cable out of the rotating "tubs" to the cable machine and then on to the burial machine.

This is the pontoon trencher we built to handle multiple cable. Although we broke it the first day, our repairs finished the job without any damage to the cable... the bottom line! It is being pulled ashore at eight mile road by a beach winch. Normal trenching is done at 15,000-20,000 pounds of line pull. The final 50' we are pulling 50,000 lbs with a winch that can pull 138,000 lbs. An offshore barge loaded with a jet pump is supplying 4500 GPM at 300 PSI . What is not apparent is the noise of the jets and the fact that at that moment it was moving three-man rocks about like pea gravel. I am taking the picture from a 45 ton hydraulic crane we are using to guide the trencher up the beach on line. Ultimately, we build a dam behind the machine, break the existing dam, remove the cable from the machine and run them down the trench to the vault.

I take myself very seriously and choose this photo to drive home the point. This was taken on top of a helicopter deck on our cable barge located off Santa Barbara this summer laying fibre optic cable to Los Angeles, Port Humene, Santa Barbara and Moro Bay. My Mac is running iTunes full blast in the galley below. Chuck Gallup

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