Florida’s Largest Dragline Boosts Production At White Rock Quarries
(1st Quarter 2006)
Vecellio Group owners Katie, Leo, Michael and Christopher Vecellio stand with North American Mining’s Cliff Miercourt and White Rock’s Jim Hurley at the catered luncheon. In the foreground is a custom-made cake featuring a “Marion 8200” at work.
White Rock Quarries is fully committed to supplying aggregates for Florida’s booming construction industry.
It showed this commitment — quite literally — for hundreds of business and community guests at a January demonstration of its latest high-capacity production tool: a massive dragline featuring a 105-cu.yd. bucket.
That’s 105 cubic yards. Holding 100 tons of blasted rock. Hoisted by a 275-ft. boom swiveling on a 58-ft. base every 75 seconds to dump another bucketful. At two shifts a day, that’s 24 million tons of limestone per year.
It’s Florida’s largest-capacity dragline, a Marion 8200 relocated from New Mexico. The 6,750,000-lb. behemoth was disassembled and shipped aboard 175 semi-trucks — some up to 13-axle, 50-wheel vehicles — for reassembly in Miami. Thirty-five technicians worked 10-hour shifts, 7 days a week for a year to complete the task.
Up and running since November, the dragline makes its way around White Rock by “walking” seven feet at a time on 12-ft. by 60-ft. “shoes.”
The machine runs on electricity, requiring its own power substation and an inches-thick “extension cord” to operate the 14 onboard motors doing all the hoisting, swinging, dragging and propelling. Together, the motors generate more than 14,500 horsepower.
Guests at the grand showing donned hard hats, shuttled to an active pit and climbed aboard the dragline to experience several digging cycles, before returning to enjoy a full-course catered luncheon.
Also enjoying the occasion were executives from North American Mining, which owns and operates the dragline under an agreement with White Rock.