Rahco International Inc., the longtime Spokane industrial manufacturer, has landed two contracts to design and build mining and canal-building equipment worth a combined about $21 million. That work comes on the heels of delivering another about $26 million worth of mining equipment in two other contracts.


Separately, the North Spokane company, which employs about 150 people and typically has annual sales of between $30 million and $40 million, believes it is close to tapping two intriguing new machinery marketsone for hazardous-waste containment and the other for the apparently resurging coal-mining industry.


The largest of Rahcos two new contracts is worth about $20 million and entails building a specialized mine-site system that will remove spent ore from a heap-leach pad and simultaneously stack newly mined copper ore in its place, allowing the pad to be reused. The equipment will be used at the remote Zaldivar copper deposit in northern Chile, which is owned by a subsidiary of Vancouver, B.C.-based Placer Dome Inc. Rahco previously had supplied the mine with a 2,300-foot-long mobile conveyor for stacking ore.


In the latest project, Rahco is teaming up with Alabama-based Continental Conveyor & Equipment Co. and FAM Forderanlagen Magdeberg, a German manufacturer.


Continental will supply some fixed conveyors for the overall system, and FAM will supply whats known as a bucket wheelessentially a big wheel with digging buckets mounted on its circumferencefor retrieving spent ore. Rahco is the prime contractor and will integrate the parts.


The system will be capable of moving about 5,600 tons of ore an hour, and is designed to remove spent ore faster than it replaces that waste with newly mined copper ore, which will lower the height of the leach pad back to optimum height for leaching.


Rahco expects to ship the equipment in July, and begin assembling it in August and September.


In Rahcos other new contract, which is worth about $1 million, the company is building two pieces of canal-building equipment that will be used on a massive canal-extension project in northern Egypt.


An Egyptian contractor there will use the Rahco equipment on an about 11-mile extension of the Sheikh Zayed Main Canal, which carries water from the Nile River to arid regions west of the big waterway.


The two pieces of equipment Rahco is building are a slip-form lining machine, which lines the canal with concrete, and whats called a jumbo, which provides a moving platform on which workers are carried while they do finish work on the concrete lining.


On such projects, Rahco usually also supplies a third piece of equipment that trims the excavated walls of a canal to prep it for the concrete, but the contractor on this job already owns that piece of equipment.


Each piece of equipment is mounted on big tractor crawlers, a pair of which run along the level ground just outside the canal, while the other pair run along the bottom of the canal, enabling the equipment to finish one side and a portion of the bottom of the canal at a time. The crawlers swivel so the entire apparatus can be driven into and out of the canal. In this case, the equipment Rahco is building will pave a canal wall about 44 feet wide plus about 33 feet of the bottom of the canal all in one pass, which Rahco officials believe is the largest such equipment available.


Rahco will test the equipment on its sprawling campus here later this month and in April, after which it will be disassembled and shipped to Egypt.


Rahco has been manufacturing canal-building equipment for several decades, and company spokesman Dennis Medina says there are few competitors for such work.


Late last year, Rahco also delivered heap-leach conveyor systems for two other big mines.


In the biggest of the two contracts, Rahco built two identical mobile stacking systems for the Morenci mine, located in eastern Arizona, for Phelps Dodge Morenci Inc. That equipment, for which Rahco received more than $20 million, is being used in a huge upgrade project at the big copper mine. Rahco designed the equipment to adapt to the terrain at the mine, reducing the mines dependence on trucks to haul ore and eliminating the need to re-contour leach pads.


The other contract, worth about $6 million to Rahco, included manufacturing new sections of a mobile stacking and reclaiming system for the Radomiro Tomic mine in northern Chile, which is operated by Codelco, of Santiago, Chile. Rahco had supplied the original system as well.


Meanwhile, Rahco is developing new equipment that it hopes will propel it into markets that could provide consistent revenues when the copper industrya key Rahco customergoes through its typical cycles of big capital spending followed by austerity.


One such piece of equipment would be used for a special type of coal mining in which coal is extracted from the high walls left after pit mines have been mined out using conventional mining methods. Rahco believes it has designed a piece of equipment that can cost-effectively recover that coal, which currently is considered marginal because of its extraction cost.


We just landed our first contract in this tough market and are building a system that should be operational mid-summer of this year, says Medina, declining to elaborate on the contract.


Rahco President and CEO Richard Hanson says the company had dabbled in that type of equipment for years, but until now hasnt had a device that was simple enough to be attractive to coal mining operations.


The timing, he says is good, since due to environmental regulations and market conditions mining companies have left plenty of marginal coal reserves untouched for want of an effective tool. If Rahco can prove its equipment works effectively and cheaply, the company could ride what is looking to be a renewed wave in coal mining in the U.S.


Rahco also has dabbled in the other new market area it hopes to tap soonin the environmental remediation arena. The company currently is working on a contract with a government agency to design and demonstrate a methodology for containing hazardous waste in situ, or where it sits, in a landfill or other dumping ground.


Though it isnt allowed to discuss the project in detail, the equipment Rahco is developing essentially would slice horizontally beneath a landfill, simultaneously leaving a protective membrane and concrete liner in its path, thus creating a lined landfill to protect groundwater from leaching waste.


Rahco has built a demonstration unit and has begun preliminary testing of it here.


It will demonstrate the product to its government customers this summer, and hopes eventually to make such equipment available both to government buyers and commercial remediation companies, both of which Rahco believes will find encapsulating waste far cheaper than moving it.