The Californian-designed crane was manufactured under licence by Vickers Hoskins of Western Australia and the main structural fabrication done by Dunedin company Farra Fabrication. It was commissioned in 1979. The boom once stood 80m high.
Port Otago civil engineer Andy Pullar said work started last Monday on the crane and was expected to be completed by the end of the month.
The crane was being demolished, in part recycled and scrapped locally, as its ongoing maintenance costs and keeping it in survey condition was not warranted, given its newer sister cranes were handling the workload.
"Its really just wasn’t being used enough," Mr Pullar said.
Port Otago’s new chief executive Kevin Winders said there was no plan to replace the third crane, but he did not rule out the possibility in future, saying that decision would be based on future customer demand.
The dismantling would cost less than $500,000.
While much of the old crane would be scrapped, Mr Pullar said Port Otago planned to recycle the box sections, or legs, into punts, which would be used at Port Chalmers as dockside floating platforms. The legs were expected to come down in 20m-long, 5m-wide lengths.
Two ZPMC Chinese-made cranes have been installed at Port Chalmers. One $11million crane was delivered in February 2006 and a second $10million, 1200-tonne, crane in June 2007.
Six staff from Rich Rigging in Auckland are working on the demolition, which is the 37th crane the company has been contracted to demolish, in Australia and New Zealand.
Mr Pullar said the crane was being gas-axed apart into manageable sections, as opposed to being unbolted. The Rich staff were "highly experienced" and used a 400-tonne mobile crane for heavy lifting plus another smaller mobile crane.
Mr Pullar said the 400-tonne mobile crane would remain on-site for the extension of the multipurpose wharf.
The $15million 140m wharf extension is to accommodate vessels longer than 280m, giving cranes better access to containers in ships’ bows and sterns. The wharf is expected to take about a year to complete.
● In late 2009 Port Otago scrapped its oldest crane at the time, also a Vickers, which was 32 years old, which similarly fell out of use with the two ZPMC cranes in operation.
