DETROIT – The topping-out of the 360-foot-tall coker drum tower at the Marathon Petroleum Co. on Aug. 6 wasn’t your typical ceremony with an evergreen tree and an American flag lashed to a final, single steel beam.

No, the final section was more of a structure – called the drill tower, the 45-foot-high piece weighed 198,000 lbs. and it took the good part of the afternoon to raise, adjust the crane and finally bolt into place.

“Everybody out here would say this was one of the more unique picks they’ve worked with,” said Mike Arban, Iron Workers Local 25 general foreman for Flour Constructors. “All the prep work made it a long day, but no one got hurt and everything came together really well.”

The installation of the final section of the coker drum tower is another milestone for the four-year, $2.2 billion Heavy Oil Upgrade Project at Marathon’s Detroit refinery. The pair of coker drums, each a million pounds, were made in Spain and floated across the Atlantic Ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway and other waterways to Southwest Detroit. They were off-loaded from barges, placed onto multi-wheeled flatbeds and were lifted into place back in November 2008.

According to Marathon, the new hardware is part of their “delayed coker” processing system at the plant, which will convert asphalt-like material into liquid petroleum fuel blend components and petroleum coke (a coal-like substance). It also will allow Michigan’s only refinery to thermally convert and upgrade heavy Canadian crude oil into higher quality products such as gasoline, diesel and petroleum coke.

Arban said the crane only had three feet of headroom to move the final piece into position. And while it was a fairly calm day, there were small gusts that swayed the structure, which made the installation “interesting,” he said. Iron workers on the ground helped guide the structure by pulling on ropes tied to two bottom corners of the structure.

“The crane had to be crept forward so it would be able to swing it into place, and that’s when the wind started,” Arban said. “The guys on the ground worked really hard to hold it. And they really battled it at the top. The operator did a great job; he did a great job on the whole structure. It was a top-notch crew all the way around.”

At the controls of the Manitowac 18,000 crane was John Peffer, a 13-year member of Operating Engineers Local 324. He said the crane’s anemometer showed the wind’s top gust was 21 miles per hour during the pick. Both he and Arban agreed that attaching the large U.S. flag to the structure wasn’t a good idea, since it acted as a sail. But all’s well that ends well.

“There was a lot of structure to it, for sure,” Peffer said. “I really wasn’t nervous, but you get all that weight up in the air, you don’t want anything to go wrong. With a job like this, it’s all about the set-up. It was a big piece, but it was well engineered, and the iron workers who built it believed in what they built, and they were the ones exposed out there. It was a good example of the trades working together.”

A 45-FOOT TALL “drill tower” was slowly lifted and moved into place to top out the coker drum structure at Marathon Petroleum Co.’s Detroit refinery.  The 198,000-lb. lift was done by a Manitowac 18,000 crane.