2009 WORLD YEARBOOK
SHIPBUILDING
The shipyards in San Diego Bay, showing NASSCO in the foreground, then BAE San Diego Ship Repair in the center, and Continental Maritime near San DiegoCoronado Bridge. Courtesy NASSCO.
The 44-ft aluminum catamaran is powered by twin Cummins QSC, 8.3 liter, 600-hp turbo-diesel engines, propelled by Hamilton 322 water jets. The Columbia River is the second most important river of commerce in North America, with three major fleets of barges carrying vast tonnages of grain down the river for export throughout the Pacific Basin. Among the yards serving the tug and barge market are Gunderson Marine and US Barge in Portland, together with Foss Maritime's tug-building yard at Rainer, Ore. The Gunderson yard is located along the Willamette River in Portland. It builds ocean-going barges for the East and West Coasts that are mostly in the 400-ft. range, although a 480-ft. barge is now scheduled, together with petroleum barges in the 440-ft. range. These barges are built on the yard's 750-ft.-long sideways launch, the largest on the West Coast. "In 2006, we went through a major expansion of the yard, completely changing the layout and going from 100 to almost 400 employees," said Mark Eitzen, manager. "We had been building two to three ocean-going barges per year, but last year we delivered eight. Crowley has given us an order for 10 barges, so, our backlog extends to 2012. We recently delivered two barges to Crowley that will be used in combination with
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Parker Drilling and British Petroleum to develop BP's Liberty Oilfield on Alaska's North Slope. The drilling platform, which is being completed in Vancouver, Wash., will be transported this summer on our two barges to the North Slope. US Barge is a relatively new company operating out of a World War II shipyard along the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon. It is owned by two local firms, Oregon Iron Works and Vigor Industrial. Recent investments include a 1,000-ton gantry crane and a drydock with a 50,000-long-ton lift capacity. The company launched its first barge in October of 2007 and "is currently building the fourth in a series of four-barges, 360 x 90 x 21-ft-deep for Young Brothers for the inter-island shuttle of containers in the Hawaiian Island," said to Brian Akin of US Barge. "We are also building four 31,500-barrel oil barges for Harley Services Marine of Seattle." Foss Maritime has a specialized tugbuilding yard along the Columbia River at Rainier, Oregon. It recently launched of the Carolyn Dorothy, reportedly the world's first hybrid tug, now in service at the Port of Long Beach. "We do new and specialized construction of tugs, such as Dolphin Class Tug Boats, at our small four-acre yard, across the Columbia River from Washington's KelsoLongview area. We built nine Dolphin
Class tugs before we built the hybrid, and currently are building a tug called the Defoss for our El Segundo, Calif., operation at the Chevron refinery," said Gene Henley, Foss' director of shipyards. "We are also building a San Francisco Bar Pilot Station Boat slated for delivery in July, and are targeting a Foss ocean-going tug as well." Foss Maritime also has a small yard of about seven acres in Seattle for the maintenance and repair of its own tugs, those of sister companies like Young Brothers in Hawaii, and other boats, together with some of the Alaska fishing fleet. "We have three small dry docks, with the largest about 80 by 400 ft. It is a nice little operation," said Henley.
Puget Sound: A Multitude of Yards
Thanks to an active coastal and transPacific maritime industry with three major sea-ports and several smaller ones, plus the Alaska trade, an extensive fishing industry, major Navy installations, and a large automobile ferry network, Puget Sound has more shipyards, large and small, than any other location on the Pacific Coast. The largest is Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle, a yard that dates back to 1916. Today, Todd is a ship-repair yard, involved in U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ship repair and moderniza-
tion programs. The yard has two drydocks, including the Emerald Sea, the largest on Puget Sound, measuring 803 x 134 ft., plus seven piers with a total of nearly 4,500 ft. of berthing space. "We have long-term contracts with the U.S. Navy to do the non-nuclear maintenance of both aircraft carriers that are homeported in Puget Sound, as well as carriers that come to Puget Sound," said John Lockwood, RADM, USCG Ret., Todd's director of marketing and business development. "We do that work inside of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton; so a large number of our employees actually work there. We also have a longterm contract to do maintenance work on the ships that are home-ported at the Everett Naval Station, as well as longterm contracts to maintain all three of the U.S. Coast Guard's ice breakers that are home-ported in Seattle. We are in the process of starting the construction of a steel-hulled 64-car combination auto and passenger ferry for Washington State Ferries. Aluminum modules for the ferry will be built by Nichols Brothers Boat Builders and Everett Shipyard, a subsidiary of Todd." Among boat builders that have been supplying aluminum catamarans to the ferry fleet on San Francisco Bay is Dakota Creek Industries, located on a deep-water channel at Anacortes, Wash. The firm has a 125-acre yard with
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