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Testing the grade in Alaska
09 Jan 2008
It took a decade of searching before an Alaskan ship repair company could find a suitable building to house some of its dry docking facilities – but once it did, erection took only a fortnight.
Seward Ship’s Drydock now has a ‘temporary’ structure more than 200 feet long and 110 wide sitting atop 55-foot steel walls. It was the only solution the company could find to match the exacting demands of its location.
The structure’s foundation is made from submarine enclosure modules that had been on the site for almost 20 years, and the building that bestrides it has been produced by Cover-All, which specialises in huge structures of this sort.
The building’s steel trusses were constructed in five separate sections on the ground then lifted by crane onto the foundation. Once the sections were in place, a specialised winch was used to position the corrosion-resistant fabric covering panels and join the sections together to complete the building cover. And since the fabric cover is translucent, the building offers a workspace with natural lighting.
“We literally shopped the world for 10 years to create what we have today,” says Don Whitman, general manager, Seward Ship’s Drydock. “Before we found Cover-All, we couldn’t find a building that was big enough that met Unified Building Code and National Fire Code requirements yet was still cost-effective. We service ships from all over the world that are up 350 feet long and weigh 5,000 tons, so having adequate room is important.”
Such buildings can be up to 165 feet wide, and have already been constructed to suit port-type applications such as storing bulk cargoes. For example, sand and salt for keeping open more than a quarter of the roads in Alberta is stored in 43 such buildings up to 72 feet wide and 120 long at 29 locations; an application that has won an environmental award for contractor Ledcor.
Ledcor’s Gary Mayhew points out that open-stored sand and salt mixture is at the mercy of the elements, with snow and rain leaching out the salt – which is not only expensive to replace, but presents an environmental hazard in the immediate area.
And Cover-All uses two of its largest buildings to house its own manufacturing plant, a 150,000 sq ft facility in Canada’s Saskatchewan province; just two of the 22,000 structures it has built since the company was formed almost 13 years ago.
