Road, ship and ferry move dump truck to Tanzania

CLIVE EMDON
IT TOOK transport by road, ship and ferry to move an 85 ton ore-carrier truck 6.2 meters wide and 6.2 meters high from Johannesburg to the Geita gold mine in northern Tanzania, says MD Mike Benney of FH Bertling Logistics . “Our business is principally to provide specialised expertise as a project forwarder anywhere in the world,” says Benney. “It’s door-to-door – we take the responsibility.” Under the guidance of operations manager Jaco Botha, the project team took 21 days to move the huge dump truck. “The key to our success is that we do our homework – route surveys and route clearances and research of the fundamentals in moving cargo country to country,” says Benney. The truck had to be transported from the company’s premises in Jet Park to Durban and from there by ship to Mombasa. It moved by road to Kisumu and by ferry to Mwanza across Lake Victoria, then south 50km to the AngloGold Ashanti Geita open-pit gold mine. All in a day’s work for the company which also recently moved a power station from Natal to Montana in the US, and a ball-mill with two 80 ton mill shells and ancillary equipment from Victoria Island in Vancouver to Takoradi in Ghana by charter vessel . “We design our logistics solutions to suit the customer’s requirements in terms of cost and timing,” says Benney. “There are always challenges that need to be sorted out en route which is why we have experienced project personnel on the ground throughout the operation,” he said.