Our second harbour mobile crane is up and fully operational. Not without considerable adventure, though.

It’s a story about a tiny stink bug, an extraordinarily lucky coincidence and a team of foreign technicians who desperately needed to leave New Zealand before being locked-down indefinitely, thousands of miles from their families, just as the global COVID-19 pandemic started to close borders and ground airlines all around the world.

The marmorated stink bug has a lot to answer for. This little critter has the ability to do New Zealand a considerable amount of damage and the Ministry of Primary Industries requires all machinery entering the country to be fumigated to stop it getting to our shores.

That included our crane. But there was a problem; the crane was being shipped from Europe, in the dead of winter. Fumigation doesn’t work particularly well in the cold. This and several other factors that combined to make fumigation impossible at the point of departure meant that we faced a lengthy, and prohibitively expensive delay, in getting our crane to Northport. Was it to be?

Then, just as all appeared lost, a potential solution presented itself. The crane could be shipped with another one bound for Australia, and they could be fumigated together there. Australia, unlike New Zealand, allows fumigation on arrival.

Some pretty intensive negotiations with MPI followed and, long story short, they agreed to accept a fumigation certificate from Australia. Needless to say, we were relieved and deeply grateful.

But as we now know, the story wasn’t going to stop there. Because in Wuhan, China, a development was occurring that threatened to throw another spanner in the works of our beautiful new Konecranes Gottwald Model 6 Mobile Harbour Crane.

She arrived at Northport on 19 February in kit form; about 30 large crates. We put these in our empty container storage yard, ready for assembly with the help of four specialist Konecranes technicians from the company’s offices in Singapore and Malaysia.

They duly arrived in New Zealand and work started on putting our crane together. Then things got interesting. It soon became clear that assembly was now a race against the clock. COVID-19 had escaped China, Northern Italy was being hammered, borders were starting to be closed and travel restrictions were starting to pop up left, right and centre.

We were half-way through construction when it became clear that the Konecranes staff needed to leave the country or risk becoming unwilling and semi-permanent members of the Team of Five Million. We decided to send three of the four home and continue the build with our staff, under the supervision of the lead technician from Konecranes, a dedicated professional who was sure we could get the job done in time for him to get home safely.

He was correct. But only just! In the end we had to release him slightly before the commissioning date and complete the final aspects of commissioning with him remotely. He’s due to return to New Zealand shortly to help us fine-tune aspects of the crane’s operation and we intend to show him then how deeply grateful we are to him and his team for the fantastic job they were able to do for us in the face of some pretty robust stresses and strains – both personal and professional.

It was worth it. The Konecranes Gottwald Model 6 Mobile Harbour Crane (G HMK 6507 variant) is already supporting our growing container trade, doubling the productivity of the dedicated container vessels using the port and providing increased resilience. It can serve container vessels up to post-Panamax class and has a maximum lifting capacity of 125 tons, extending our flexibility in handling general and heavy cargo.