THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 4, 1996 TAG: 9601040269
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY HENRY J. HOLCOMB, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA LENGTH: Long : 111 lines
The dirtiest and most environmentally hostile part of ship repair - blasting and repainting a huge hull - is quietly being tamed this week at the former Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.
Metro Machine Inc., the Norfolk-based ship-repair firm that has a short-term lease on Drydock 4 at the old Navy yard, is using a new system called CAPE to clean and repaint the hull of the Seattle.
CAPE contains noise, crud, fumes, volatile organic compounds and, Metro says, cost overruns.
The work under way is the first full test of CAPE, which Metro plans to market around the world and use to build a ship-repair business at the old Navy yard and at its new yard at the former Sun Ship south yard in Chester, Pa.
Blasting a crusty hull that has been underwater for five or six years is the part of ship-repair work that shipyard neighbors hate the most, said Earl A. Proetzel, a retired Navy commander who is CAPE's operations manager.
``Blast grit, sand and dust goes everywhere,'' he said. ``It gets on cars in the parking lot and (it gets on) boats.''
Dust and grit pollute the air and water, and volatile organic compounds from the painting process also damage the earth's critical ozone layer.
That was before CAPE, an acronym for Compliant All Position Enclosure, which Metro Machine says it has developed and patented in the world's shipbuilding countries.
Metro was driven to develop an environmentally friendly system by the location of its primary yard in Norfolk. It is directly across the narrow Elizabeth River from Waterside, a tourist and office center.
Bad press four years ago drove the 32-year-old, employee-owned company to conduct a worldwide search for a cleaner way to clean and paint hulls. Finding none, the company, which has annual revenues of about $85 million, invested $10.5 million and went to work inventing CAPE, which it tested in Norfolk 10 months ago and is putting to full-scale use here.
``What we are doing is radically different from anything that has been done before,'' said Metro's president, Richard Goldbach.
European shipyards have developed expensive automated equipment that confines grit and dust that ricochet from the blast. But, Goldbach and other industry sources said, that equipment works well only on vertical sides of vessels, not on curved portions and bottoms, and it does not control pollutants released during painting.
Metro's current blasting-and-painting project, the Seattle, would have cost $2.4 million using conventional methods, Goldbach said, but with CAPE, the cost will be $1.7 million. The 26-year-old Seattle is a 793-foot fast-combat-support ship of the Sacramento class.
On average, Goldbach said, the CAPE system will shave costs by 20 percent to 30 percent because it takes less time and is not subject to weather delays. The savings will increase, he and others say, as environmental enforcement becomes stricter and drives up the cost of traditional methods.
The CAPE system includes two major components:
An enclosed barrier, erected around one-quarter of the ship at a time, with modular units that fit together relatively quickly, like the Lego block toys with which children play. Each vertical section contains a platform that can be moved horizontally and vertically, keeping blasters and painters close enough to the hull to do their work.
A collection of high-tech equipment adapted from the automobile industry and other painting applications that can be either installed permanently alongside the dry dock or, as it is here, on a barge that can float from shipyard to shipyard.
This equipment keeps air pressure inside the enclosure slightly negative, to assure that airborne pollutants won't leak out. This equipment pumps fresh air into the enclosure - and into the masks of workers - while sucking polluted air into high-tech devices that filter out grit and dust, and incinerate volatile organic compounds at 1,450 degrees.
The CAPE system keeps the temperature and humidity inside the enclosure at just the right level for blasting, painting and paint curing. Thus, work can continue rain or shine, sleet or snow.
Conventional blasting and painting requires halting all other work on a ship and sealing a vast array of equipment that is vulnerable to grit and dust. But CAPE makes this prep work unnecessary, thus cutting time off an overhaul.
Because the closed CAPE system allowed work to continue through the recent bad weather here, the time saved on the Seattle will be about two months, Goldbach said.
With ships worth $10,000 to $50,000 a day to owners, eliminating delays due to weather and other causes is money in the bank, he said.
Contract worker Buddy Lowe of Mobile, Ala., agrees. He has spent 16 years traveling from shipyard to shipyard, to wherever there is blasting-and-painting work, and says CAPE is the ``best thing to come along since sliced bread.''
Among other things, it means he can work year-round, instead of from March to September, and do a higher quality of work with less risk of getting hurt or sick.
``It will eliminate a lot of downtime and reworking . . . that can turn a project like this into a pretty drawn-out situation,'' Lowe said.
Without CAPE, he said, he would have spent much of the last week sitting and waiting for the weather to get better. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
Color photos
MICHAEL MALLY/The Philadelphia Inquirer
The CAPE system developed by Metro Machine is an enclosed modular
system that eliminates the venting of paint fumes and sandblasting
dust into the air. The system is being used for the first time on
the fast-combat-support ship Seattle at the former Philadelphia
Naval Shipyard.
SOURCE: MMC Compliance Engineering Inc., a division of Metro Machine
Corp.
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB