Local structural movers eye global market
Local structural mover Nguyen Van Cu said he is completing the final procedures to raise and repair a tilted hotel in Cambodia this Thursday. Cu said the hotel was part of a casino complex near the Cambodian border with Vietnam. The Ho Chi Minh City mover said he would raise the three-story building, weighing nearly 4,200 tons, 50 centimeters. He said he would also repair its tilt.
Cu started to work as a structural mover in 2004 after quitting his job as a personnel manager at a construction company in HCMC. He said his company was currently raising and moving three buildings in HCMC.He added he was also planning to repair a leaning building and raise a temple in central Thua Thien – Hue Province. He has recently raised two structures in HCMC, a villa in District 2 and a five-story building in Binh Thanh District. “We haven’t been able to meet the increasing demand,” said by Cu. “Not only in HCMC, but customers from other provinces have also asked us to lift or haul houses.” Cu revealed he was also awaiting a permit to raise the dormitory at a college in the southernmost province of Ca Mau.
Another well-known structural mover in the north, Do Quoc Khanh, has just departed for the US to attend the annual conference of the International Association of Structural Movers (IASM) in Virginia, taking place February 18-22. His company, Vietnam Disposing Settle Foundation Company (Vina DSF), is the only Asian representative to IASM, which has member companies from 12 countries worldwide including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Greece, New Zealand, Peru, Sweden, The Netherlands, the UK and the US.
Vina DSF has petitioned for IASM’s “Heaviest Building Moved” award for its accomplishment of moving a 3,000-ton building dozens of meters from its original site in Hanoi’s Phu Cat Hi-Tech Park in January 2008. “I will introduce our local technologies at the conference,” he said. “We also hope to access more technologies as well as buy foreign equipment.” The cybernetic engineer spoke he would also look for foreign orders for the emerging structural moving industry in Vietnam.
For the Phu Cat project, Khanh hopes to win the IASM award, the “Genie of the North”, as he’s called, led a team of 40 workers and 160 students from the Hanoi University of Civil Engineering to successfully move a 2,000- square-meter building 50 meters from its original location. The structure was the heaviest ever moved in Southeast Asia and reportedly the fifth heaviest in the world.
He used Japanese, Russian and Chinese technology to build the equipment needed to move the building, IASM reported. The association added that Khanh had designed 80 percent of his company’s equipment.
Vina DSF, established in 1998, has repaired 200 tilted houses as well as relocated and raised many structures. They moved a four-story building weighing 250 tons in Hanoi 2.62 meters from its original foundation and repaired an eight-story tilted building in Ha Giang Province.
Khanh was currently busy planning to move a 600-ton building in Nam Dinh Province nearly 65 meters from its original site. However, he said the building also needed to be rotated 180 degrees and raised 50 centimeters. “It will be the first building to be rotated in such a fashion in Southeast Asia,” said by Khanh.
Another mover, local construction worker Nguyen Cam Luy, is also known throughout the nation for his ability to move and raise the most challenging structures. Throughout his 17 years in the hauling and moving business, the construction worker from the Mekong Delta’s Dong Thap Province has successfully moved over 200 buildings and structures of various shapes and sizes. He quit school in grade four, but by the age of 21 he had become a skilled construction worker with bold ideas. In April 2007, he managed to move a 1,500-ton structure 11 meters from its original site in Binh Thuan Province.
Few people are working in strutural moving now,it is quite new and interesting work in construction in Vietnam. Hope that there will be more and more people working in this field while construction is developing as present.
