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Public Grain Export Elevators at Port of New Orleans of the public grain export elevator at New Orleans is the landscaping of lawns, roadways and walks, demon: strating that a great waterfront utility can present an attractive appearance while providing for the practical de- mands of ocean commerce. That the decorative efforts should include song birds may seem strange, but their presence is primarily a safeguard to the lives of elevator employes. ‘They have been the means of saving human life on innumerable occasions, and are indispensable, being used almost every day for detecting gases in deep storage bins and particularly where low qual- ity corn or oats have been stored. As soon as the dangerous condition is known to exist, all gases can speedily be eliminated by an air hose. Te most distinctive characteristic sively to grain handling purposes. From the marine leg to the sacking plant, the creosoted timber wharf is 2090 feet long and none of this front- age is used for any other purpose. There are five berths—one for dis- charging barges or ocean vessels at the marine leg, one for loading at the sacking plant, and three for loading bulk grain under the spouts. At the sacking wharf, the grain is brought direct from the conveyor Sys- tem to hoppers located in the wharf- shed, where there are four highspeed Richardson automatic scales. Hach scale has a capacity of better than one thousand bushels an hour, while the sacking wharf itself has a transit stor- age capacity of 250,000 bushels of sacked grain. Steamers of any draft can come to this berth. There are S. S. TsrpesarR Loading Record Cargo of 501,000 Bushels Wheat at Public Elevator, New Orleans The air hose is a part of the air- compressor system by which air is piped to every part of the plant, in- cluding the conveyors, the marine leg and the sacking wharf. Air is used for blowing off the walls and for clean- ing the 90 motors, which range from one horsepower to 150 horsepower. Accumulation of dust is prevented, eliminating the dangers of dust explo- sion. It also operates a Peterson pneu- matic car-door breaker (opener), which reduces to a minimum the amount of time necessary for breaking into a car. By the use of this device it never re- quires more than two minutes to open up a car, and there is also the advan: tage of saving the grain doors, which, by usual methods, sometimes are de- stroyed. It is doubtful if there is any export grain elevator facility elsewhere which has so large a frontage devoted exclu- 28 sack-sewing machines which enable all grain to leave the wharf in a machine- sewn bag. Elevator Of Large Capacity The main elevator structure, with a storage capacity of 2,622,000 bushels, was placed in opération in 1917 and is located on the east bank of the Missis- sippi, just above the public cotton warehouse. Construction is of rein- forced concrete and is fireproof. <A complete dust collecting system, sup- plemented by the compressed air, makes dust accumulation impossible and eliminates any posibility of explo- sion. Operated under a published tariff, it 1S Open on equal basis to all railroads and to all water carriers entering the port of New Orleans, and is served by tracks of the Public Belt railroad. The unloading shed for freight cars MARINE REVIEw—October, 1931 is equipped with eight receiving pits, each capable of holding 2000 bushels, and, on a ten-hour basis, the elevator has an unloading capacity of from 160 to 180 cars per day—or etter than 200,000 bushels. This is exclusive of marine-leg unloading capacity. New Orleans is the only port on the Gulf of Mexico that has a grain eleya- tor marine leg and it is unusual be- cause it must accommodate a rise and fall of approximately 22 feet in the river stages, and has to handle grain out of a great variety of craft, ranging from the lowest river barges to the largest steamships which enter the port. These requirements were met by a special design of belt-and-bucket con- veyor operating in an enclosed steel lofter, the leg proper, which is sus- pended from a boom attached to a cross-head that can be raised or low- ered or moved horizontally as river stages may require, and as may be re- quired by the variable heights of ves- sels and locations of hatches. After being elevated in the lofter the grain is spouted by gravity to a system of con- veyor belts and lofters which carry it a distance of 1300 feet into the main elevator. The cost of this facility was approximately $300,000. At the marine leg wharf electric capstans are installed for the expedi- tious mooring and moving of non- propelled vessels. The dock board have another marine leg at the I. C. Stuyvesant elevators, where similar large horizontal and vertical movement was attained by a design consisting of a traveling counter-balanced leg and boom, with practically equivalent op- erating efficiency. In either case all operations are controlled by one man. The marine leg at the public grain elevator has a maximum of unloading capacity of 15,000 bushels an hour, and an average working record on barges approximating 7500 bushels an hour. Since it was installed in October, 1918, this leg has handled nearly 73,000,000 bushels of barge grain, in addition to several million bushels of import Ar- gentine corn arriving in ocean steam- ers. The record year was 1925, when the leg handled 11,000,000 bushels, of which 9,500,000 were wheat. The public grain elevator is equipped with Carter disk separators. It has four of these separators of 250 bushels capacity each. This equipment is used for the separation of different kinds of grain one from the other, and for the removal of dockage. It is used a great deal, and particularly is being utilized for the removal of corn, oats and other foreign substances from rye shipments. For reconditioning grain, the public grain elevator has a Morris dryer of two units, each of 1200 bushels capac- ity. At the Stuyvesant docks eleva- tors, there are two Hess dryers of six units, each unit with a capacity of 500 bushels. The board of commissioners of the Port of New Orleans, in addition to operating their own public grain eleva-