My AEC experience has been that cranes are expensive enough that “everyone” does whatever they can to avoid needing them and when they need one they rent one.
Because cranes are expensive crane operators are expensive and crane insurance is high (because cranes kill people), crane companies only work economically because crane companies can stay busy.
But when you rent, your schedule is dependent on every other crane customer’s schedule. You get a crane only when one is available and odds are you are not the crane company’s best customer nor the customer with the deepest pockets to pay priority service rates.
In my AEC experience cranes get “surprisingly bigger” as horizontal reach increases…levers work that way.
By “surprisingly bigger” I mean without actual experience with crane tables…my first AEC job involved cranes and prestressed concrete in a business culture where employees had been killed with cranes. And I spent time in the yard where driveable gantries were handling big chunks of concrete “overhead”…by “overhead” I mean you could wind up under twenty kips if you weren’t careful and Carl didn’t know you were there.
You seem to be trying to refute me, but everything you said exactly matches my experience and what I'm trying to say. Your project managers and design should be such that you minimize your crane costs, and when it comes you get as much done as you can. Even though a crane is expensive, when used well their portion of the cost is tiny.
There are enough canals in CA that I would expect to be an important customer of the cranes. You don't get a crane on demand, but you can always plan such that when you get the crane there is plenty of work.
I don't understand what problem you're worrying about though. Others have already brought up the data center example where Google often will leave a server rack in place for five years even if some of the individual computers in it have failed. That is, it's easy to replace an entire rack at once than to replace just parts.
Similarly, for a system like this, I would expect they would build in components, let's call them racks of panels, however many that are connected together. If one of these so-called racks fails, leave it up until whenever and then replace the whole thing.
Possibly you'd have to remove a bunch of panels from the canal if the support's collapsed, but you should be designing them for the highest possible wind roll, but so that's unlikely to happen. Well, earthquakes are a problem, and I'm not sure how much you can design for that, but once again, you design for that. In any case, if something happens in a disaster, well, you may have to remove some panels from the water, but that's a labor job that needs a little bit of safety training. But otherwise, no crane. You just remove it and throw it away. You come back with the cranes later to repair the system back to where it should be. I'd be thinking using a tow truck for disaster recovery, not a crane.
Because cranes are expensive crane operators are expensive and crane insurance is high (because cranes kill people), crane companies only work economically because crane companies can stay busy.
But when you rent, your schedule is dependent on every other crane customer’s schedule. You get a crane only when one is available and odds are you are not the crane company’s best customer nor the customer with the deepest pockets to pay priority service rates.
In my AEC experience cranes get “surprisingly bigger” as horizontal reach increases…levers work that way. By “surprisingly bigger” I mean without actual experience with crane tables…my first AEC job involved cranes and prestressed concrete in a business culture where employees had been killed with cranes. And I spent time in the yard where driveable gantries were handling big chunks of concrete “overhead”…by “overhead” I mean you could wind up under twenty kips if you weren’t careful and Carl didn’t know you were there.