Suction in the monastery pond runs from the shor
Klosterweiher, St. Georgen
16.10.2023
After a forced interruption of several weeks due to the grenade discovery, Amodes resumed work on desilting the monastery pond in St. Georgen in September 2023. After it could not be ruled out that further munitions were lying at the bottom of the monastery pond, the specialist for environmentally friendly desludging reacted directly to the new situation. Since then, Amode’s machine operator Rudi Steiger has been sitting in a seat and operating the excavator with joysticks. ‘The manufacturer has cloned the driver’s seat one-to-one so that we can operate the dredger comfortably and risk-free from the shore,’ explains Carsten Dam, Managing Director of Amodes.
Remote-controlled operation is a first for Amodes. ‘Normally, bodies of water that are known to be in a former dumping zone are sounded beforehand so that we can then carry out our work normally.’ In Klosterweiher, however, the discovery of the munitions came as a surprise, which is why the remote control method had to be used.
For the machine operator, it makes no difference whether he is sitting directly in the driver’s cab of the excavator or on the shore. ‘There is even the advantage that the machine operator can see from the shore when the wind is pushing the dredger away.’ All functions are currently still transmitted to the dredger via a floating cable, which currently limits the dredger’s range of action. ‘However, we are already in the process of converting the dredger to radio remote control. Then we will have a radius of 500 metres,’ says Carsten Dam.