The Rear View Mirror

We stayed with a family in Frankfort, KY where some of the most expensive horse pastures in the world are. On the way to work with my host he pointed out the stables of the Sheik of Dubai.

Quebecor World Inc. is one of the largest printing corporations in the world, employing 38,000 people. The Versailles plant is one of 160 around the world, but is one of the largests at a staggering 1,300,000 square feet. To give a sense of scale, here is the outline of the plant overlayed over the university.

This facility employs around 700 full-time workers and can flux to 1,000 in peak production. It houses sixteen different presses and all of the necessary equipment to get a book from electronic PDFs to a bound Encyclopedia Britanica. One of the jobs that was about to start had just received a shipment of 250,000 lbs. of paper by rail, which was offloaded into the paper warehouse seen here.

One time a while back a forklift operator was pulling two rolls of paper off the top, which the forklift is designed to do. It has opposing clamps that will grasp the rolls like a small child would grasp a big cup. The problem was that the bottom roll was smaller then the top, so the top roll acted as a stop and prevented the forklift from clamping hard on the bottom roll. When the operator lifted them off the stack the bottom roll fell free hitting the stack beneath and creating a domino effect down the whole center section of the warehouse. The rolls at the far end actually fell through the wall of the building.

This is one of the smaller web presses running at the facility.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 14th, 2005 at 8:16 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.