Hope and Hempstead County: Get Ready for Your Crane Exam

Outages at the Turk plant

Southwestern Electric Power Co., an AEP company, is the principal owner of the Turk plant, which began commercial operation in December 2012 as the first ultra-supercritical coal unit in the United States, rated around 600 MW. AEP has reported about 109 SWEPCO employees on site.

Big generating units go through scheduled outages, and outage season brings contractor cranes for boiler, turbine, fan and conveyor work. Those lifts are often tight, heavy and closely planned. Operators who understand load charts with complex configurations, and riggers comfortable with multi-point picks, are the people outage contractors try to find. Rigger Level 2 and mobile crane operator prep line up with that work.

Poultry construction around Hope

Tyson announced a $70 million, 131,000-square-foot hatchery in Hope in March 2023, with completion expected by late 2024, and earlier invested $67 million in a Hempstead County feed mill. Feed mills mean tall bins, legs and conveyors; hatcheries and processing plants mean steel framing, refrigeration and rooftop mechanical units. New grower farms add poultry house construction around the county. The lifting ranges from big crane picks on the mill to boom-truck work on farms.

Bread lines and food plant installs

Poultry is not the only food business adding space in Hope. In January 2024 Hope Baking Company announced a more than $37 million expansion of its plant, expected to add 266 jobs over two years. The company is a division of East Baking Company, which bought Southern Bakeries in March 2023 and has since added a production line in Hope. The plant makes breadsticks, English muffins, fully baked breads and brown-and-serve rolls.

Picks over a plant that keeps baking bring their own planning. Exclusion zones have to work around shift changes and delivery docks, nobody can stand under the load, and installs often get squeezed into a short shutdown window, so the rigging plan needs to be settled before the crane arrives.

• Oven sections and proofers that arrive in modules and have to be set level
• Spiral coolers and conveyors threaded through existing buildings
• Rooftop air handlers and refrigeration units picked over a running plant
• Silos and bulk ingredient systems outside the walls

Things that complicate lifts in southwest Arkansas

• Clay soils that swell and soften with heavy rain — check ground bearing before setting outriggers.
• Spring storm lines with damaging wind and lightning moving in from Texas.
• Hot, humid summers that make hydration and shade part of the lift plan.
• Overhead lines along rural roads leading to farms and substations.

Certification, without a state license

Arkansas has no crane operator license of its own. Private worksites are under federal OSHA, handled by the Little Rock Area Office, and 29 CFR 1926.1427 requires certification from an accredited testing organization plus an employer evaluation. Signal persons and riggers have their own qualification rules. You can take written exams through Online Proctored Testing, and practical exams are scheduled at an accredited site through the certifying body. Texarkana is about half an hour west on I-30, Shreveport and Little Rock each roughly a two-hour drive. More detail is in our requirements guide.