Harper’s Field – Unloading a Mud Hopper
Harper’s Field – Unloading a Mud Hopper
by: Steve P.
Monday last week saw another milestone for Harpers Field with some mud hopper unloading activity at the existing landing stage using the digger and dumper working together. The dredging team on Patricia had dredged the area adjacent to the dock into a 70ft hopper, but with the recent rain the hopper had then grounded in the middle of the canal. After pumping out the water the hopper was moved up to the landing stage, and Andy and Les with the 13T digger and 6T dumper soon made short work of unloading it. With the bigger bucket on the 13T digger compared to the long reach digger it only took about 4 buckets to fill the dumper, and Les soon learnt that you had to go forwards up the field otherwise the contents sloshed out of the front of the dumper!
The team on Patricia then joined in as well, filling the hopper at one end while the digger team emptied it at the other end in a good example of coordinated teamwork. This should give us more clear water near the loading dock, and hopefully prevent mud hoppers from going aground in future.
The real purpose of this activity was to unload Warp, which had been filled up with rocks, metal and rubbish from the clean up activities at Langley’s field, but Warp had been moored next to Ryeford bridge, so when the boat team on Margaret turned up the hoppers were swapped and the digger moved onto unloading Warp.
This proved much more challenging than silt to move due to the size of some of the rocks, and in future we perhaps need to use 1T bags or similar to grade and store the rocks before they are loaded at Langley’s Field; they can then be unloaded more easily with less wear and tear on the equipment. Patricia then helped to move Warp back to the Ryeford bridge side so that limited dredging to the how empty mud hopper could continue.
