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Heavy metal: Seaspan's $155 million upgrade fueling renewal of the industry

You don’t have to go far to see the most visible sign of Seaspan’s $155 million two-year overhaul of Vancouver Shipyards. Just look up — way, way up.
shipyard
A worker on the panel line, a centrepiece of Seaspan's shipyard modernization, overeseswork of an automatic welding head.

You don’t have to go far to see the most visible sign of Seaspan’s $155 million two-year overhaul of Vancouver Shipyards. Just look up — way, way up.

Since the spring, a massive new gantry crane — the largest in Canada — has stood 80 metres tall on the shipyards site at the foot of Pemberton Avenue.

Its presence on the North Vancouver waterfront sends a message: that the shipyards are back as an economic engine, on a scale not seen since massive federally-supported contracts halted 30 years ago.

This time around, Ottawa is again fuelling the resurgence of the West Coast shipyard industry, with its national shipbuilding program.

In 2011, Seaspan won the right to negotiate contracts to build seven federal non-combat ships, worth an estimated $8 billion.

Those ships include two massive navy joint support ships and a polar icebreaker.

But to ready itself to do that work, the shipyard had to reinvent itself. It had to “go big.”

The $18 million gantry crane is indicative of that new scale. It was shipped in three pieces from China in a heavy lift ship.

To put it up, the company contracted by Seaspan to provide it had to first take apart a second 1,600-tonne 110-metre-tall crawler crane in Russia, put it on a ship, then offload it at Lynnterm Terminal. “It took 82 trucks to get it from Lynn Terminal to our property,” said Tony Matergio, vice-president and general manger of Vancouver Shipyards. “It’s just a monster.”

The crawler crane is long gone now, but the permanent gantry crane, dubbed “Big Blue”, will do the heavy lifting when building for the first national shipbuilding contract gets underway next year.

Its job will be to move massive pieces of ship, weighing anywhere from 80 to 300 tonnes, into place for final assembly.

That approach to building ships would be foreign to those who worked at places like Burrard Dry Dock and Versatile Pacific — North Vancouver’s iconic shipyards of the past.

“If you wind the clock back quite a number of decades, ships were built one piece of wood or one piece of steel at a time and erected on the berth,” said Matergio. “Pipefitters and electricians would show up when the ship was floating.”

Those days are gone, he said. Today, large shipyards operate more like manufacturing plants, building modular pieces on what is essentially an assembly line.

Vancouver Shipyards has gone from a yard that mainly built and repaired barges and small vessels to one designed for large ship construction — a very different facility.

To help with the design of the new system, Seaspan brought over experts from STX Korea — a huge modern shipyard — for advice early in the process.

“For shipyard design, part of it is how much land you have to deal with. Part of it is the particular type of ships (you will be building),” said Matergio. “Shipyards are designed to build the particular product they’re good at.”

In the new shipyard, steel plates that arrive on a flatbed truck come first to the sub-assembly building, where they are cut by two new state-of-the-art computer-controlled cutters, including a plasma cutter.

Steel is brought to the shipyard as it’s needed. “Years ago we’d buy all the steel for the ship the same day and it would show up and we’d store it,” said Matergio. “We don’t do that anymore. We just have it delivered as required.”

A computer program with instructions on how to cut each piece of steel is transmitted to the robotic cutter remotely from the shipyard’s technical office.

The machine is extremely accurate — down to millimetres, said William Clewes, Vancouver Shipyards’ director of operations.

When it comes out, each piece of cut steel is automatically etched with a number indicating which project it is for and how it fits together with other components. Then it gets collected with other pieces needed for the next step in assembly and put together in a kit.

Once the shipbuilding program is fully up and running, there’ll be pieces of steel continuously moving on to the next station. Most parts of the shipyard will operate 16 hours a day, five days a week.

Everything in the sub-assembly building is new, said Clewes. “Including the building.”

About two-thirds of the $155 million spent modernizing Vancouver Shipyards and about $15 million spent on Seaspan’s Victoria Shipyards — where final sea trials and testing of vessels will take place — was spent on new buildings and facilities. One-third was spent on equipment, which came from countries around the world.

A new 1,000-tonne Nieldand cold forming press in the forming shop next door, for instance, came from Holland. It’s technology used throughout the world that allows shaping of steel into three-dimensional pieces without heating it — even the two-inch thick steel that will eventually be used for the polar icebreaker.

Another centrepiece of the modernized shipyard is the “panel line” — where large flat pieces of steel are welded together and reinforced with angle bars.

A robotic single-sided welder at one end of this assembly line can weld two 18-millimetre thick plates together in one pass — and take a fraction of the time it would have before — 20 minutes as opposed to several hours.

As the large steel panels move down the conveyer, hydraulic arms press angle bars into place on the panel, where they are automatically “tack welded” into place before moving down to a final station where a robotic welder with six welding heads can weld three bars at a time.

There are fewer people doing this work than there would have been on the task in the past. Each machine generally has one welder and one crane operator.

But neither Clewes nor George MacPherson, president of the B.C. Shipyard General Workers Federation — which represents many of the trades at the shipyard — are concerned about that.

Work is simply concentrated in other areas of shipbuilding, farther along in the process, said Clewes.

“Stuff that’s left requires higher skill,” said MacPherson. “There’s still a lot of manual labour.”

There are about 200 people working in trades at the shipyards today, but that is expected to dramatically increase to about 1,000 people within the next three years.

The company, which currently has 17 apprentices working in Vancouver Shipyards, expects to hire more apprentices by next year and re-train those who are already qualified with transferable skills from other industries.

Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of interest.

“It’s a well-paid job and it looks like it’ll be a well-paid job,” said MacPherson, citing an average rate of pay of about $38 an hour, plus benefits.

Unlike many existing jobs that fit that description, a job at the shipyards lets local workers stay home and see their families, says MacPherson, “as opposed to going to Fort McMurray.”

Jacob Burnikell, a 35-year-old welding foreman who’s been working on and off in shipyards for the past seven years, understands that. “This is huge for North Vancouver,” he said. “The opportunity to have that many jobs accessible potentially for a long period of time is huge for any community.”

Of the 35 people who report to him now “probably eight or 10 of those could be in Alberta or up north, but they’re here,” he said.

“I’ve got some good young people coming back now. They’re ready to work at the shipyard.”

It’s a definite improvement over downturns in the past where he’s had to lay people off. “You build a team then you lose that team,” he said. “Hopefully (now) the crew I have will see the start of the vessel and the end of the vessel.”

In the block assembly shop, telescoping pins — or pin jigs — support pieces of shaped steel while they are manually welded into larger pieces.

At the end of the shop are two large chunks of what will eventually be the new cable ferry — one piece upside down. At this stage, pieces are often built upside down and turned over, said Clewes. “It’s easier for a welder to weld down than to weld above him.”

Under the new system, workers who arrive at a dedicated workstation will start the day with a work order detailing their tasks. “All the material will be there, all the tools will be there,” said Clewes.

Welding torches hang from cranes inside the shop, fed by 500 lb spools of welding wire. “Guys don’t have to carry stuff into the work area,” said Clewes. “They just drop it from the crane.”

From here, bigger assembled pieces might go into a new paint shop — where state-of-the-art ventilation and dust recovery systems have been installed. Or they may head into one of several “pre-outfit” bays, where the mechanical parts of the ship including engines, pipes, cables and electrical systems will be installed before the large modular blocks are put together — a radical departure from shipbuilding of the past.

The systems going into the large ships will come from around the world. Seaspan already has partnership agreements with the Canadian subsidiaries of a number of multinational companies —ImTech Marine Canada, Thales Canada, Computer Sciences Corporation and Alion Canada — specializing in marine technology and defence contracts.

Two new self-propelled modular transport systems — up to 32 rolling axles that can lift 1,000 tonnes and are operated by remote-control chest backs — will then take the massive blocks of the ship to the pre-erection area of the yard to be put together under huge multi-storey shelters.

When the blocks are 150 or 200 tonnes, the gantry crane will lift them on to the berth. “That’s when they form a ship, when they put them together,” said Clewes. “Those blocks will be put together like large Lego blocks.”

When the ship is built, it will move on to a load-out pier, be put on a floating dry dock, taken to deep water and floated off. The last five per cent of the build, including final testing, will be completed at Seaspan’s Victoria Shipyards — near to the Canadian navy base at Esquimalt.

The joint support ships won’t be the first ships built at the modernized yard, but they are certainly the biggest ships that are part of the contract and ones that have attracted the most attention.

Both the parliamentary budget officer and the auditor general have questioned whether $2.6 billion set aside by Ottawa will be enough to build two ships, noting the government hasn’t adjusted that figure in a number of years, despite delays in deciding to build the ships.

The political ante in getting the ships built was also recently upped when Ottawa announced it will decommission two of its existing support ships earlier than expected over concerns about their structural integrity.

When finished, the 173-metre ships will be the biggest vessels ever built in western Canada.

But depending on when contracts get signed with Ottawa, Seaspan isn’t expected to start building those ships until late 2016 or early 2017.

To start off, Seaspan will ramp up its production with three fisheries science vessels. The contract for the first of those — a 55-metre research vessel — and production on it is expected to start in earnest in the spring.

Six months after the first ship is begun, the second vessel will be started and eight months after that, work on a third will begin. A 78-metre oceanographic vessel will follow.

In fact, two of the large modular blocks currently being built at the shipyard alongside the new cable ferry will eventually form part of the hull of the first fisheries vessel. Building the two blocks — which will each measure 12 by 12 by 10 metres — allows the company to test its equipment and procedures before production pressure mounts.

Not that anyone’s complaining.

To date, Ottawa has signed an “umbrella agreement” with Seaspan, indicating its intention to go ahead with the first seven vessels. A further 10 ships worth about another $3 billion have also been announced.

In rough terms, that’s about 15 years of work, say shipyard bosses. And they are confident there will be more to follow.

That’s good news for people like Burnikell, who got his start in shipyards years ago when a friend told him about an outfit looking for someone to wash the bottom of the boats. “I rolled out the pressure washer and a foreman came over and said, ‘You don’t want to wash boats. I need some help fitting this plate.’”

He hasn’t looked back since. “Everybody’s who’s in the shipbuilding industry, they have a big sense of pride of workmanship,” he said.

The modernization project represents a spectacular turnaround for an industry that struggled to stay afloat in the decades since large federal contracts dried up at the end of the 1980s and B.C. Ferries — once a mainstay of the business — opted to build its large new ferries in European shipyards.

At the end of this two-year upgrade however, Matergio has no hesitation saying, “We are Canada’s most technologically advanced shipyard.”

In the short term, “Our order book is full,” he said.

But in the long term, he sees the federal contract as the beginning, not the end, of the future for the shipyard industry.

Burnikell is looking forward to working on the big ships. “There’s something extremely special about building a vessel and launching a vessel,” he said. “Knowing that vessel is going to be around for a long time. At the end of the job you know it’s going to have some adventures behind it and it’s going to be because of you.”

He likes talking about the heydays of the shipyards with some of the old-timers. They tell him about the best days, he said, “‘When we were building ships. When everyone was going.’”

“All of them say, ‘It’s coming. It’s coming again.’”