Choctaw County Crane Certification for Mill, River and Timber Crews

The Naheola mill and the Tombigbee

Naheola started as a Marathon Southern paper mill in the 1950s and passed through American Can, James River and Fort James before Georgia-Pacific took over. It employs more than 900 people and makes retail bath tissue, paper towels and bleached paperboard. A 2019 announcement laid out more than $120 million for a new tissue machine and roll storage building, alongside a new biomass boiler and woodyard.

Projects of that size bring crawler and hydraulic cranes, multi-crane picks of dryer sections and long stretches of shutdown rigging. Pennington is the only spot in the county with rail, highway and water access together, and barges on the Tombigbee still deliver chips to the mill. Dock and barge work adds swinging loads over water, shifting decks and river levels that rise fast after heavy rain upstream.

Oilfield roots and the timber economy

H.L. Hunt’s well near Gilbertown opened the state’s first oil field in 1944 and led to the creation of Alabama’s State Oil and Gas Board a year later. Production faded by the 1970s, but wellsite service, pipe handling and pump jack repair still call for truck-mounted cranes in parts of the county. Forestry has been the backbone of the local economy since 1847, so knuckle-boom loaders, sawmill maintenance and pole yards keep plenty of hands near hoisting equipment.

Good fits for Choctaw County workers

• Rigger Level 2 for paper machine rebuilds and planned outage lifts
• Mobile crane operator for contractors brought in on mill projects
• Service truck crane operator for oilfield and equipment service trucks
• Signal person for barge, dock and blind-pick communication

Rules that apply on this side of the state line

No Alabama license exists for crane operators, and the same is true across the river in Mississippi. What counts is the federal standard. For construction, OSHA’s 29 CFR 1926.1427 requires certification from an accredited program and an employer evaluation before an operator runs the crane alone. Signal persons must be qualified under 1926.1428, and riggers under 1926.1425. Overhead cranes inside a plant follow 29 CFR 1910.179.

Alabama is a federal OSHA state, with area offices in Birmingham and Mobile. Read more in our state requirements guide.

Getting to an exam from Butler

Written tests can be taken by online proctoring, at a computer test center or at a test event, so a candidate in Butler may never need to leave home for that part. The practical exam is different: it is hands-on at a practical test site, and you will likely drive to a larger city for it. Meridian, Mississippi, is the closest sizable city; Mobile and Tuscaloosa are longer trips. Plan the practical early if your crew is scheduling around a mill outage.