Mega Transports (2017)
Everyone knows heavy haulage: large parts are transported on big trucks with yellow warning lights on streets. However, all that is "peanuts" compared to our "mega transports": heavier, larger, more complicated and more unusual. These require pinpoint planning, which can only take place with special safety precautions, and for which large teams plan months in advance before things are ready.
Seasons & Episode
The brand new oil rig, West Bollsta, worth $500 million, travels from manufacture in South Korea to Europe. Although self powered, the rig still needs a specialised high powered ocean tug, the ALP Striker, to assist with the long trip.
The worlds largest, but extremely sensitive and valuable, radio telescope array antennas, have to be relocated to new sites in the inhospitable Chilean Atacama Desert. The job is further complicated by the 5,000 metre altitude, and extreme weather.
The Höegh Trapper is the largest car transporter in the world. It can carry 8,000 vehicles in 71,000 square metres of storage space. One of the construction design factors was the need to negotiate the bottleneck of the Panama Canal.
A wind farm - over 2,000 tons of highly sensitive and valuable cargo - needs to get from Europe to Taiwan in Asia using one of the world's largest heavy lift vessels. A team has only 37 days for loading in two ports and travelling once around half of the globe. To be able to transport the entire cargo, the crew even has to build another level altogether - in the middle of the deck.
Russia has some of the most extreme weather conditions in the world, especially in winter. Transporting one of the biggest bulldozers in the world, to gold mines in the Kolymar mountain range in eastern Russia is a major mission, through an inhospitable frozen landscape of snow covered mountain passes, temporary bridges and unpaved ice roads.
The team faces winding country lanes, ramshackle bridges and an unexpected change of plan as its members try to take a 390 tonne generator on a journey of 120km, before their permits expire.