Look up. Look way, way up.
There's a blue behemoth on the North Vancouver waterfront - Seaspan's massive new gantry crane, which this week became the most visible part of the shipyard's $200 million modernization project.
"There were a lot of high fives around here today," said Brian Carter, president of Vancouver Shipyards on Wednesday. "It represents a significant milestone."
The crane, which can lift 300 tonnes, was shipped from China in three pieces and erected on the east side of the Vancouver Shipyards site this week.
The rectangular-shaped crane stands 80 metres tall and runs on rails within the shipyard site.
While the final structural piece of the crane - the main horizontal girder - was lifted into place over several hours on Wednesday, it will still take several more months to install the cables, hydraulics and other systems to get the crane ready for work.
The crane will do the heavy lifting when the shipyard starts building vessels under the federal government's $8 billion National Shipbuilding Program this fall. Ships will be built in separate pieces before the parts are moved into place by the crane for final assembly.
Once it is operational, the gantry crane will be the largest of its type in Canada, said Brian Carter, president of Vancouver Shipyards. The total cost of the crane, installed, is between $15 million and $20 million.
Carter said there has been plenty of interest in the crane as it went up this week.
"You can see this thing from a long way," he said. "People understand what it represents, which is economic interest on the North Shore."
Seaspan will officially name the new crane later this spring when it chooses a winner from among 228 entries submitted by North Shore students from grades 4 to 7. In order to erect the gantry crane, an even taller, stronger crane had to be brought to the Vancouver Shipyards site to lift the pieces into place.
That crane - a large crawler crane with a 115- metre long boom and capacity to lift 1,350 tonnes - was shipped from Russia by the company contracted to get the gantry crane up and running. The crawler crane itself was put together from 80 truckloads of parts, said Carter.
At a height about 35 stories, it's been attracting quite a lot of attention on the North Vancouver waterfront, he said. "It's the tallest thing on the North Shore."
That crane will be taken down when its work is finished.
Work on the shipyard's modernization project is about 75 per cent complete, said Carter, and is on track to be finished by the end of October this year. It includes construction of four new buildings on the site.
Seaspan will begin working on the federal shipbuilding program this fall, with construction of an offshore fisheries science vessel.
That project is scheduled to start in October and take about 18 months. Seaspan will build three fisheries science ships and an oceanographic vessel before starting work on the two joint support ships for the navy and polar icebreaker sometime between late 2016 and 2017. Those ships will be the biggest ships ever built in western Canada.
The workforce at Seaspan is expected to grow to about 1,000 at that time, said Carter.
Last fall, the federal government also announced plans to build an additional 10 Coast Guard vessels at Seaspan, worth over $3 billion.
