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PETROLEUM DIRECTORY: BK Hanna sees many uses for heavy-duty, hardwood mats in Alaska Construction mats and other types of hardwood mat protect the surface of the ground and provide a firm base for heavy equipment Alan Bailey PNA Contributing Writer
Have you ever had to place planks across muddy ground, to provide a solid surface to walk or work on Scale that scenario up to a major construction site, and you will understand the need for industrial strength matting to support heavy equipment or provide temporary roadways.
BK Hanna Construction Mats, a firm based in Portland, Ore., specializes in the supply of hardwood mats for the construction and oil industries. The company sees opportunities to use the mats in Alaska.
“I think that they would work tremendously well (in the Arctic tundra),” Ben Hanna, owner of BK Construction Mats told PNA. “Maybe you can get in two weeks earlier than you did before ... that’s going to make a world of difference when you have a tight construction schedule.”
“I think that with the environmental concerns and the permafrost issues that the contractors and oil drillers have to deal with these mats are an ideal situation,” Hanna said.
The mats, constructed of hardwood laminate, are five and a half inches thick and tremendously strong. With a standard size of eight feet by 16 feet they weigh in at 2,500 pounds a piece. “I’ve run a 50 ton crane on top of these (mats) in an extremely muddy situation with no problem,” Hanna said. And they can handle even larger equipment than that.
Ben Hanna and his wife Kara founded BK Hanna about two years ago, to sell and distribute mats on the U.S. West Coast for Hanna Manufacturing, a family-owned hardwood mill in Louisiana. BK Hanna also works with five or six other lumber mills, in order to ensure that it can source all the needs of its customers.
Hanna Manufacturing has been operating for 30 years, and has been producing oak laminate mats for the oil, logging and construction industries for the past 10 years. Mats protect environment Construction mats distribute weight across soft or delicate terrain, so that heavy equipment can operate without damaging the ground or sinking. “Contractors like mats because they make it much more efficient for them to work — they set them down very quickly, they can operate on top of them, pick them up and go to another job site with minimal (need for) restoration to the environment underneath,” Hanna said.
In one example, a construction site in Portland required the placement of a crane on 15 feet of soft fill. “They needed to place a crane to get to the backside of a building,” Hanna said. “They ... were able to stage the crane on top of our mats with no problem.”
Hanna explained that, because of the ability of the mats to protect the environment, the Unified Sewerage Agency has specified the use of the mats for many wetland jobs in the Portland area.
In one situation a constructor in Portland moved dump trucks across a peat bog by laying down a mat road almost 300 feet long. “They were able to get their trucks back into an area that was previously inaccessible,” Hanna said. Upon completion of the work the constructor was able to pick up the mats and move on.
The Army Corps of Engineers also encourages the use of the mats for environmental protection. “(The Corps of Engineers) likes these mats because they eliminate compaction to the subgrade (and) they eliminate rutting, which causes erosion channels,” Hanna said. Oil drillers use mats The versatility of the mats has proved invaluable to the oil industry in the southern United States, especially for operating in agricultural areas such as sugar beet fields.
In a typical application, a drilling company will lay up to an acre of mats, in order to deploy the loaders and cranes that are required to assemble a drilling rig.
Loggers also make considerable use of the mats. “Some loggers in the south use these (mats) to get through the bogs — (the bogs are) a big problem with logging in Texas and Louisiana,” Hanna said.
One company has even used mats in the construction of an airstrip on Guam. “They used these (mats) to operate their excavators in the swampy area, and they worked very well for them,” Hanna said. BK Hanna had to arrange the manufacture of special mats, suitable for shipping by container to Guam. Different types of mats As well as construction mats, designed for general use on construction sites, other types of mats provide more specialized support.
Crane mats, bolted together from 12 inch by 12 inch sections of hardwood or Douglas fir, can bear especially heavy loads. Whereas construction mats have to lie on the surface of the ground, the greater strength of crane mats enables them to span gaps in the terrain. “Those mats are primarily used in a weight bearing application,” Hanna said.
The interlocking mat, another specialized design, involves a two ply system that results in a very stable structure; one set of mats laid on the ground overlaps and interlocks with another layer of mats on top. You can make a temporary road with any of the types of mat, but interlocking mats are meant to be down for a longer period of time, Hanna said. “They’re a little more cumbersome to put down, but they hold up, they’re more stable.” Mats can be re-used The durability of the hardwood mats enables them to be used multiple times. This re-use of the mats makes them more cost-effective than other techniques for working on soft ground. “They hold up as well as the contractor takes care of them,” Hanna said.
Because of their re-usability, BK Hanna has been able to rent mats, as well as selling them. “They hold up so well that I’ve actually been renting them in the Portland area,” Hanna said. “They could be a potential rental product for someone else.”
Regardless of their re-usability, the mats often prove cheaper than techniques such as the use of gravel. “They bridge so well you would need a tremendous amount of gravel to achieve the same amount of stability that these mats can provide,” Hanna said. And, unlike gravel, people can easily remove the mats when they clean up a site. Benefits of wood construction The construction of the mats from wood provides advantages over the use of other materials such as steel. “A steel sheet would weigh three times as much as our mat, and the equivalent cost is about three times as much,” Hanna said. A steel sheet is so thin that it tends to cut into the mud, he added.
And wooden mats flex really well when laid on rough terrain. “The mats provide traction because they’re wood, and they float very well,” Hanna said.
With the impressive record of mat usage in the oil, construction and logging industries, Hanna feels that there are many opportunities to employ the mats in Alaska. The mats seem an obvious way of working on the tundra and areas of permafrost. “They’re such a simple concept that it’s really easy to grasp,” Hanna said. “We have the expertise to tell (people) what mats would work in their situation — logistically we help them with getting them to places.”
The possibilities in Alaska certainly seem endless.
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