Who receives and erects a silo on a Korean plant site: from foundation handover to first fill

The silo is on the water, the Korean site has asked for a delivery window, and the question that comes back is the one nobody settled at the order stage: who takes it off the trailer, and who stands it up. Foundation, offloading, lifting and first fill are four separate scopes, and on a Korean plant site they are rarely held by one party. The contract names the equipment and the delivery term. It does not name the person who signs for the load, or the company whose crane does the lift.

The sequence matters more than the split. A foundation accepted after the sections land turns a laydown area into a storage bill. An erection contract signed after the trailer is at the gate means an unchecked crane and a crew with no site pass, so the load stays where it is. Each takes days to arrange in advance and weeks to unwind afterwards.

The foundation is handed over before the silo ships, not when the crane arrives

Civil work belongs to whoever holds the site, the plant owner or the contractor building the line. What they build it to is your drawing: the anchor pattern, the base plate footprint, the bolt projection above the concrete, and the position and level tolerances the silo needs to stand plumb. That drawing has to be accepted early enough for the concrete to cure and the survey to be done before anything is loaded in your yard.

The handover itself is a document. An as-built survey records the actual anchor positions, projections and base plate levels, and someone has to compare it against your plan and accept or reject it in writing. That someone is whoever will later be held to a plumb silo. If your scope ends at the shell flange, say so in the order. If it runs to first fill, reviewing the survey is your work, with a named reviewer and a turnaround time, because a foundation query raised while the ship is at sea has nowhere to go.

Foundations that are inside tolerance still hold up a project when nobody was named to accept them. The silo arrives into an argument about whose delay it is.

Getting the sections through the gate

Korean road rules decide where a truck stops being an ordinary delivery. Under Article 79 of the Enforcement Decree of the Road Act, a road authority may restrict vehicles exceeding 2.5 m in width, 4.0 m in height (4.2 m on roads it has designated), 16.7 m in length, 10 tonnes axle load or 40 tonnes gross weight. Above any of those, the transport company applies for a restricted vehicle operation permit tied to a specific route and vehicle, with a load calculation for the structures on it.

Those figures make the shipping split a site decision rather than a freight decision, which is the whole of shipping a silo into Korea as bolted flat-pack or welded sections. A welded shell course that clears the port gate can still be stopped by one bridge on the last few kilometres, and the route survey that finds it is done before the vessel is booked or not at all.

The plant gate then adds rules that are published nowhere. An operating site runs a delivery window, registers vehicles and drivers in advance, and often limits when heavy loads may cross its internal roads. All of it has to be set up ahead of the truck, from a Korean address. That is why site delivery is its own scope rather than the tail end of shipping.

What the signature at the gate closes

Someone signs the delivery receipt. That signature is where the carrier's liability ends and the receiving party's begins, and after it a transit damage claim gets much harder. Before it happens, photograph the load on the trailer with lashings still on, check the packing list against what is there, and write any damage onto the receipt rather than reporting it the next day.

Two things go wrong here most often. No receiver was named, so the receipt is signed by whoever is at the gate. And the laydown area: a bolted silo arrives as bundles of panels, stiffeners, bolt kits and sealant, and a bolt kit missing between gate and erection date is a reorder against a crane already booked. Whoever handles inbound logistics should take custody, hold the bundles under one inventory, and hand them to the erector against a list.

What the erection contractor has to produce before it mobilises

Erection on a Korean site is construction work, and a company taking it on generally needs a construction business registration under the Framework Act on the Construction Industry. A foreign firm can hold one, but not from abroad on the week of the lift, so in practice the erection contract goes to a party already registered here.

Lifting on an operating plant also puts a duty on the party whose workplace it is. Under Article 63 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, a company that awards work to a contractor must take the safety and health measures needed to prevent accidents to that contractor's workers on its own site, currently up to three years' imprisonment or a KRW 30 million fine, and up to seven years or KRW 100 million where a worker is killed. The duty stops short of direct instruction on how those workers do the job, an exclusion written into the same article. What that produces on site is a plant that controls access, permits and induction closely while leaving the erection method to your contractor.

Before mobilisation there is a document check. A mobile crane has to carry a valid safety inspection: for a truck-mounted crane, the first within three years of vehicle registration and every two years after. Since 1 February 2020 its operator has to hold the national crane operator licence or a completion certificate from the prescribed course. The inspection and the operator qualification sit in different instruments, so ask for both by name, not for "the crane papers". These provisions are amended from time to time, so confirm the current text before it goes into a contract. None of it can be produced on the morning of the lift.

Korean day-hire construction workers must hold a four-hour basic construction safety and health training certificate before they start, shown at site entry. An erection contractor's own permanent employees sit outside that requirement, and everyone who walks through the gate takes the plant's induction regardless. Ask the erection contractor which of its crew falls where before mobilisation.

The supervisor you send needs a status, not a stamp

A supervisor sent to oversee erection is performing work in Korea, and immigration treats it that way. The short-term employment class (C-4-5) covers people dispatched under a service, purchase or supply contract to install or maintain imported machinery, or to supervise the manufacture of industrial equipment. It runs up to 90 days on single entry and cannot be extended, so a schedule slip is not a ground for staying on. Work past 90 days falls under D-9-2, granted for up to two years at a time, with alien registration within 90 days of entry.

The point that catches people is payment: being paid by the home office rather than in Korea does not move the visit outside the rule, because what counts is whether services are performed. A business visit stamp covers meetings and a walk around the site. Witnessing the lift, checking alignment and signing off mechanical completion is work performed in Korea, and that is the activity the short-term employment class exists for. Match the status to the task rather than to the length of the trip, and confirm the current classification with the consulate handling the application.

What has to be closed before first fill

Standing the silo is the visible milestone. First fill is the one that transfers risk, and between them sit items that stay open because each has a different owner: the grout bed and its sign-off, the anchor bolt tightening records, the verticality check taken after grouting rather than before, seam sealing on a bolted shell, the vent filter and relief device, and the level instrument.

If the silo sits on load cells, their calibration is the item most often done in the wrong order. They read whatever is attached to the vessel after they were zeroed, so every pipe, conduit and walkway connected later shunts part of the load away from the cells. Calibrated before the fill line and the electrical runs are connected, they stay permanently out, usually by a margin small enough to be blamed on material density for months. Zero and span both have to be taken with all of that already on.

Protection stops first fill more often than anything mechanical, so the filter, relief device and level instrument belong in the site delivery scope from the order stage rather than in a punch list. Once the silo stands and the line runs, retrofitting silo protection on a plant already running in Korea is a different job at a different price.

Six months on, the boundary nobody wrote

An unwritten boundary does not show up at erection. It shows up the first time something is wrong with a full silo.

Half a year in, a weep appears at a bolted seam, or the level reading drifts against consumption, or a grout bed cracks at one leg. By then the erection contractor has demobilised, the plant has run the silo as its own asset, and your warranty is read against a foundation and an erection that produced no records. The anchor bolt tightening record, the post-grout verticality check, the sealant batch and date, the as-built survey: if those were never collected as one set, the discussion becomes an argument about whose part failed, and the party without documents loses it whatever happened.

Those records cost nothing at the time and cannot be created afterwards. Tell whoever holds receiving and erection in Korea, at the order stage, that the deliverable is a document pack as much as a standing silo.

Send the general arrangement drawing and the anchor plan through our contact page, and you get the receiving and erection scope back step by step, with the permit and the record each step has to produce.