The other kind of "ship of the desert"
The New Silk Road not only paves international corridors, it also hands out awards. In Kazakhstan, the Austrian Foreign Trade Centre Almaty has presented Gebrüder Weiss (GW) with the Silk Road Biz Award 2021 for completing a major project in which GW transported 35 dredgers from the Netherlands to the eastern Turkmen city of Kerki.
The dredgers, each weighing 90 t, are used to keep rivers and canals free of sand and sediment deposits coming from the nearby Karakum Desert.
The project, which took a year to complete, involved breaking down the dredgers into components and then transporting them on heavy load trucks via the New Silk Road to Turkmenistan. An average of eight heavy load and a total of 254 oversize transporters were used per dredger along the 7,000 km route. (sh)