Moving day has now come and gone, and The Chronicle has settled into its new home at 215 N. Pearl St. in Centralia, just across the street from its old building at 321 N. Pearl St.
As part of the move, The Chronicle’s owners, Chad and Coralee Taylor, enlisted the help of Dry Box. Ahead of the move, the company dropped off one of its 40-foot metal shipping containers at the office, which was promptly packed full of filing cabinets, archive books and stacks of newspapers.
Unlike other containers that may be left on a truck, the Dry Box container was set on the ground for easy loading and then lifted back onto the truck.
The container, which has now been relocated to the parking lot of The Chronicle’s new building, will serve as the paper's new temporary archive storage as well as storage for archived editions of CT Publishing’s weekly newspaper located in Yelm, the Nisqually Valley News. According to Chad Taylor, the archive records for The Chronicle stretch back to the newspaper’s founding in 1889.
After being packed to the brim, the brown shipping container was picked up by Dry Box to be moved across the street. The lifting process required a piece of specialized equipment that consists of two hydraulic lift arms that can extend over the side of the truck.
According to Dry Box Operations Manager Ed McCammon, this type of lift is relatively rare in the U.S. The lift arms themselves can raise up to 77,000 pounds; however, the truck bed can handle only a bit less than half that at 33,000 pounds. Like a small crane, the lift can be used to stack the metal container boxes or load them onto trucks.
“We can pick it up. We can set it on other trucks. We can stack them,” McCammon said. “This piece of equipment is pretty popular in Europe and Australia and New Zealand. They're not very popular in the states yet. There are a few around that we do have.”
According to McCammon, the lifts can also maneuver containers in and out of difficult places where a crane would normally be needed. He described a difficult job where their truck was able to lift and haul out a shipping container that was sitting with its base 2 feet below street level, and in a tight space at that.
“You couldn't do it any other way except for a heavy crane,” McCammon said. “But the problem is, a lot of times cranes take up their own space.”
Watching the relocation of the box was quite the sight as massive metal stabilizing legs first extended out from the semi-truck trailer before the hydraulic lift arms themselves extended out over the box, dangling massive industrial strength chains.
The awkward positioning of the box meant McCammon was forced to control the hydraulic arms manually instead of using one of the automated motions. After hooking up the chains to the shipping container, McCammon and his team walked all around and between the hydraulic arms, lifting each side little by little, keeping it stable, level and safe.
After managing to get the container safely onto the truck, the Dry Box team got to practice a few more times as they had to drive the box off into a nearby lot and reposition it before dropping it off at its new home.
After being filled up and lifted, the container was moved across the street to the newspaper's new location where it will stay, protecting the history of the local paper as well as the history of greater Lewis County that is detailed within the old pages.
