Arnold & Co.

The Arnold & Co. sand and gravel Werke AG is a Swiss company of building material - and the transport sector based in Flüelen in the canton of Uri . The association of Swiss dredger and cargo ship owners also has its business address at the company, 9 of its 28 member companies are active on Lake Lucerne .

Construction material extraction

Gravel and sand were always available in large quantities as building materials on the rivers in the canton of Uri, which were rich in debris. The citizens of the Uri Corporation were allowed to purchase sand and gravel for their own use. The extraction of sand was done by hand until the 19th century and was therefore mainly possible in the shores of Lake Uri and on the sandbanks of the Reuss . With the increase in building construction in Switzerland and since the construction of the Gotthardstrasse and Gotthardbahn , which for the first time required very large amounts of building material, there was a much greater demand. After 1830, the canton of Uri imposed an export duty on sand.

At the end of the 19th century, a branch of the economy operating with modern technology developed for the exploitation of sand and gravel. To better control these activities, the canton of Uri issued regulations in 1898. From then on, a license had to be obtained for trading sand or gravel from public waters.

Company history

In 1891, the predecessor company of Arnold & Co. near Flüelen began mining gravel from the alluvial fan in front of the Reuss delta with the help of dredgers . For this she paid the Uri corporation a gravel tax and later a concession fee to the Uri canton. The founders of the company Franz Aschwanden & Cie. were Franz Aschwanden, Johann Arnold senior, Johann Arnold junior (1842–1922) and Karl Ziegler. The company was called Kompany in everyday language .

In 1923 Johann Arnold junior, Josef Aschwanden, Josef Rietmann and Anton Ziegler as well as Melchior Blättler and Balthasar Nufer from Alpnachstad formed the new company. In 1928 Franz Arnold-Beeler (1897–1984) took over the management of the company, which has operated as a general partnership since 1969 and as Arnold & Co. AG since 1983.

technology

Transport ships

Nauen "UR 35 Reuss" on Lake Uri

Floating dredger near Flüelen

In the 19th century small, driven by rowers transported Ledischiffe with a capacity of up to 40 tons of the material conveyed to the hubs on the lakeshore. Such a ship took 13 hours to travel from Flüelen to Lucerne . To support the rowers, sails were set when the wind conditions were favorable. The rowed Nauen were replaced in the early 20th century by motorized barges that could hold around 100 tons. The Adler ship, built in 1905, is still in use today on Lake Lucerne after being converted for other purposes.

From the western Swiss company Sagrave SA in Lausanne , founded with the help of Arnold & Co. in 1910 , the folding ship Rudenz came into the possession of Arnold & Co., which in 1974 also acquired the folding ship Rhone from western Switzerland, built in 1962, and its fleet perished in 1965 the Gotthard , expanded in 1972 with the Uristier and in 1991 with the new barge Rudenz . The company has recently deployed 16 ships on Lake Lucerne.

With their ships, Arnold & Co. also carried other goods such as wood and dynamite from the explosives factory founded in 1873 near Isleten across the lake.

Dredgers

The dredger , which was first put into operation on Lake Uri in 1897, was able to extract gravel from a depth of up to 15 meters. Two more dredgers were added by the Second World War . The grab excavator used from 1955 onwards reaches a depth of 50 meters, the excavator built in 1966 120 meters.

Vehicle fleet

The company uses crawler excavators , pneumatic shovels and other equipment to carry out hydraulic engineering work, especially on the shores of Lake Lucerne, and removes debris flows and debris from streams and gravel collectors after floods . Arnold & Co. is involved in the rehabilitation of the Obermatt quarry in Weggis on Lake Lucerne.

Material handling

In Flüelen is the home port of the vessels of the Arnold & Co. in 1916 put the company on the site of the former brick hut in the Seematte in Flüelen a hub to which a railway siding features. In 1917 she built a gravel works with a ballast sorting system , where the materials are made available according to different grain sizes . In 1969 a concrete production plant was put into operation.

Other unloading points on Lake Lucerne deliver to the ships in Brunnen , Küssnacht am Rigi , Horw , Lucerne and Stansstad . In 1924, a crane was used for the first time to unload the freight at the transhipment point in Lucerne.

environmental Protection

In the 1980s, discussions about the effects of long-term dredging on the banks of the Reuss Delta led to specific landscape protection measures . In order to preserve the shallow water zones on the lake shore, future gravel extraction has been coordinated with nature conservation since the so-called Delta Law was passed in a referendum in the canton of Uri on December 1, 1985. With the Reuss Delta project , Arnold & Co. received a new concession for gravel mining in the lake. Between 2001 and 2005, the company carried out excavated material from the Gotthard base tunnel near Amsteg (crystalline rock) and from the tunnel of the A 4 bypass Flüelen (Altdorfer sandstone) to the delta area as part of the Uri sea filling project, using self-unloading ships to lay its own conveyor belts lead each other on six new islands.

Web links

• Arnold & Co.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Website of the Association of Swiss Dredger and Cargo Ship Owners
2. ↑ sand and gravel. In: Website of the municipality of Flüelen
3. ↑ Nauen on Lake Lucerne. In: With a clear view (blog)
4. ^ Groupe Sagrave. Historique. In: Sagrave SA website
5. ↑ Our ships and dredgers. In: Website of Arnold & Co.
6. ↑ Hansjakob Burkhardt: Dynamit am Gotthard - Explosives in Switzerland: A history of the explosives industry in Switzerland using the example of Isleten on Lake Uri. Baden 2012, ISBN 978-3-03919-248-9 .
7. ↑ Obermatt quarry: Fallboden has been cleared. In: Website of the municipality of Weggis (media release)
8. ↑ Embankment of the lake - new habitats thanks to tunnel excavated material. ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Website of the Conference of Commissioners for Nature and Landscape Protection 
9. ↑ The islands from the Gotthard. In: Website of the Reuss estuary working group (PDF; 3.9 MB)