Donated shelter makes its journey to Sand Lake
T-R PHOTOS BY GARRY BRANDENBURG — On Friday at about 10:30 a.m., Ferneau & Sons House Moving & Raising Services completed their preparatory work of many months to raise and then move an old shelter house/bandstand from the property of the Emergency Food Box. Formerly, the building was a brewery whose owners sold the property to the Food Box. Since the shelter had to go, a proposal was made to sell it to the Conservation Board for one dollar, but Conservation would have to arrange for its removal. Since the structure is made of heavy duty steel frame with wood floor and a two segmented roofline, it was decided and approved to have it placed at Sand Lake, where it arrived at about 2 p.m. Friday.
T-R PHOTOS BY GARRY BRANDENBURG — On Friday at about 10:30 a.m., Ferneau & Sons House Moving & Raising Services completed their preparatory work of many months to raise and then move an old shelter house/bandstand from the property of the Emergency Food Box. Formerly, the building was a brewery whose owners sold the property to the Food Box. Since the shelter had to go, a proposal was made to sell it to the Conservation Board for one dollar, but Conservation would have to arrange for its removal. Since the structure is made of heavy duty steel frame with wood floor and a two segmented roofline, it was decided and approved to have it placed at Sand Lake, where it arrived at about 2 p.m. Friday.
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Moving a large structure or building of any size is a tremendous undertaking. When left in the hands of professional house moving company Ferneau and Sons, they made the difficult job a doable job thanks to a lot of pre-planning, decades of a family owned operation with lots of experience, good preparation, and route planning.
Owners Kevin and Matthew Ferneau used specialized equipment of a towing tractor, many long steel beams, dolly wheel sets and many blocks and clamps, and other gear to get the structure released from its moorings, and then pull it away. The structure will be repurposed into a public use shelter at Sand Lake just east of Marshalltown.
Once on North First Street, the entire structure received its final alignment and preparation for the road trip to Sand Lake. Obstacles along the way were anticipated and mapped out. Items known to provide diligence were tight corners, street signs, mail boxes, lots of no parking signs set up for the day so no residential area vehicles would be in the way.
Police escorts and traffic control at key intersections was one of the planning factors. Once the rig entered Highway 14 they traveled to Marion Street, then east past the JBS facility and onto 18th Avenue.
From there, the motorcade went south to East Main Street, then east toward Sand Lake. A Marshall County Sheriff's deputy and Marshalltown Police officers assisted in traffic control. Once the rig was pulled off of East Main Street, traffic was released.
On every Marshalltown city street and East Main county road, this extra wide load, approximately 30 feet, displaced the entire roadway width. This big rig was a definite case of who has the right-of-way being a question that did not need to be asked. The towing rig plus the weight of the shelter's frame, although not weighed, would have tipped the scale at over 20 tons.
Staff from the Marshall County Conservation Board coordinated final movement of the structure into Sand Lake's parking lot. Then preparations were made to back the building onto its new set of foundation footings previously installed immediately north of the east parking lot on a small hill with a great view of Sand Lake's waters.
This summer, MCCB staff will install a new roof, provide electricity to this structure and the other shelter house, and provide landscaping enhancements in order to make Sand Lake even more attractive to outdoor recreation users.