Dow Chemical Chooses SafeRack Gangway System

SafeRack was the ultimate choice of Dow Chemical for the design of gangways to ensure worker safety. Like any other company, Dow chemical workers also used to climb on rail cars using ladders which was completely unsafe. SafeRack collaborated and designed customized gangways for them and the safety, efficiency and worker satisfaction of Dow Chemicals workers is off the charts.

Right now we’re in Atlanta. We’re headed to Dow chemical and Marietta, Georgia which is right above Atlanta. The platform and all was just installed so we’re going to go and check it all out, shake hands let’s see I think. 

I think Dow prides itself on our safety record. We’ve got over two year record going and so we like to keep it. We had two sites here on the end, they had no platforms at all so it’s required the guys to put on a full restraint and climb the side of the rail car, drag their hoses up which is just completely unsafe. 

This particular job has a five rail cars, we need to access five rail cars, they’re unloading a few and loading some and had to access the points on top as you see here. All the real cars were different, they’ve got so many lengths of rail cars. On this particular job, we had to do a lot of tracking gangways so they can get to all their parameters. 

You know Dow is a pretty good-sized facility, we’ve got relationships with several different people that sell platforms of this nature. I went through the process, SafeRack came out not only as the vendor that would most economically meet our needs but by far seem to be the most flexible as far as what we were trying to. 

These guys did a good job; this is aluminum construction on it keeps it kind of lightweight so we were able to do this without the use of any pneumatic devices. It’s all spring loaded and spring balance. So basically this gives my operator a safe walk way out to the car. The rail cars go in and out on a daily basis so that something happens every day. One of the other good things about it is you don’t have to be an Olympiad or a train weightlifter to put it back in its towed position, it comes up quite readily. 

We were a little bit different breed of animals from the standpoint of… we had contractors in place that we’re going to do a lot of the civil work. 

We were in touch with the engineering firm, we worked with them hand in hand to help them with their civil work, you know where things were landing, where things should go and what size. 

They were, like I said, very helpful in getting my civil guys information they needed to put the foundations in correctly, so it pretty much went off without a hitch, it was a very good process.