DC Velocity - March 2015

inbound

When it’s completed in July 2015, a refrigerated warehouse now under construction in Richland, Wash., will be able to claim a number of distinctions. According to Preferred Freezer Services, the Chatham, N.J.-based company that commissioned the building, it will be the largest refrigerated warehouse in North America and house the biggest automated freezer system in the world. It will also be the first warehouse in North America to use a nitrogen-based oxygen-reduction system as its main fire prevention mechanism. The warehouse is expected to handle about 2 billion pounds of frozen food per year.

“Deep Freeze,” the cover story for Construction Today’s Jan./Feb. 2015 issue, provides some impressive statistics on the warehouse: The 455,000-square-foot building will contain three freezers totaling 313,000 square feet, 12,000 square feet of office space, 120,000 square feet of truck and rail dock space, and 10,000 square feet of electrical and mechanical rooms.

The building will be 116 feet tall, with 117,000 pallet positions stacked 11 high. Steel pallet racks fabricated and installed by Frazier Industrial serve as the main structural support for the roof and walls. When completed, the project will incorporate a reported 21 million pounds of steel.

Picking and putaway will be handled by a fully automated storage and retrieval system designed and installed by Dematic; people will enter the freezers only for maintenance and repairs. As Construction Today tells it, pallets of inbound goods will be whisked into the freezers via a conveyor and monorail system. Once inside, the pallets will ride on a shuttle Frazier has dubbed the Pallet Mole. The shuttles themselves will be transported by crane to a storage rack; upon arrival, the shuttle will detach from the crane and travel along rails within the rack to the designated storage position. The Pallet Mole will then lower the pallet onto the rail and return to the crane.

To read the full article, go to www. preferredfreezer.com/admin/uploads/ victoryPfs.pdf. You can watch the Pallet Mole at work at www.frazier.com.

How cool is that?

Very young children are fascinated by anything with wheels. So why not introduce them at an early age to the exciting world of freight transportation? Two new children’s books about commercial trucking might be just the ticket.

The first, written by former truck driver Susan Burton, is titled My Auntie Susan Drives a Big Truck. Burton, who drove a truck for nearly 30 years, says the book was based on the hundreds of postcards and letters she wrote to her “Trucker Buddy” pen pals at elementary schools and to her nieces and nephews about her life on the road. The book is available in paperback or e-book form at Amazon.com or through Burton’s website, www.susanburtonbooks.com.

The second book, Papa Doug Hauls Strawberries & Smiles, tells the story of a professional truck driver and his young son. The book was published by the Tennessee Trucking Foundation to help educate children and families about the important role trucks play in everyday life. A portion of the proceeds from book sales will go to the Trucking Moves America Forward campaign. For more information or to order, visit www.tntrucking.org/foundation.

Trucking tales for children

Reverse logistics—the processing and management of returned products and materials for repurposing, recycling, or disposal— will soon have its own specialized bar code. The Reverse Logistics Association’s (RLA) Standards Committee has released a new product labeling protocol it says will expedite reverse logistics processes for repairs, returns, and recycling.

The protocol relies on the use of multidimensional QR codes to encode information that is relevant to reverse logistics. According to RLA, the codes could provide information related to product repairs, including links to documentation; product returns, including links to warranty registration; and recycling, including information about hazardous content. The scan-friendly codes will be placed directly on the product rather than on disposable packaging, so that the information will always be available to consumers, logistics professionals, field personnel, and recyclers.

RLA says it is working with vendors to assure that the labels are readable by free smartphone applications as well as by com-mercial-grade scanners. The group is also developing software that will generate camera-ready labels that conform to the new standard.