Issue link: https://jocdigital.uberflip.com/i/957444
April 2018 | The Journal of Commerce 15 www.joc.com Breakbulk & Project Cargo Complex Cargo, Innovative Solutions. That's the RTM Difference. From container to projects and everything in between, RTM offers innovative routing across a worldwide network and friendly, knowledgeable customer service. When it needs to get there safely, swiftly and securely, rely on RTM's 30 years of expertise. BREAKBULK FCL HIGH & HEAVY MILITARY PROJECT RO/RO R T M L I N E S . c o m • + 1 8 0 0 . 8 4 7 . S H I P • Oil & Gas • Mining • Construction • Aviation • Automotive • Power Generation Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Crowley also has delivered some 37,000 concrete, wooden, and steel utility poles measuring up 70 feet long; 7,000 transformers; and 3,500 pieces of other non-containerized cargo, including construction vehicles, utility trucks, generators, and wires and cables. Crowley recently began transport- ing to Puerto Rico multiple bridges in sections for roadway reconstruction in Utuado, a region in the mountainous region of La Cordillera Central, where a bridge outage cut off access to the remote community of Rio Abajo. Bridge sections are shipped in 16 to 18 containers and on flatbed trucks. Crowley also has carried an oversize IMT AF-160 drill, a 119,000-pound piece of equipment that "We've seen over the decades that the cost of desalination is going down because of vast improvements in membrane technologies, such as very efficient energy-recovery devices and more efficient pumps," Shor said. But to remain competitive, IDE also has been working to reduce transporta- tion and logistics costs. Like its compet- itors, IDE contracts with overseas firms, often in China, to fabricate the pipes, pumps, pressure vessels that are then shipped to the sites where final assem- bly of the desalination plant takes place. Traditionally, IDE and other desali- nation companies have shipped these pieces of their plants as breakbulk cargo. More recently, IDE has been trying to fit as many modules as possible into containers, in order to further lower its costs and shorten its shipping sched- ules. Shor said it is more efficient to prefabricate modules and test them in advance of shipment than to wait until the various components are connected at the plant site. "We are going very far down the path of modularization," he said. "Our com- petitors are doing similar things, but not to that extent. This is a transition that you see in the entire industry. It's a huge engineering effort; it is not easy," he said. This makes shipping "a very big issue" in the desalination business. "I've told my workers that a seawater reverse osmosis project is basically a logistics project," he said. Now that desalination technologies have been proved, he said, logistics "is the main challenge." l email: alanfield0@gmail.com. "We are going very far down the path of modularization."