Competition heats up for ship repair jobs: as orders for new vessels lag, yards fight for contracts to maintain existing ones.

A long the wharves of Virginia's historic Hampton Roads--home to the largest naval base in the world--the competition among shipyards always has been stiff. These days, however, the shipyards are competing more to repair existing U.S. Navy vessels than to build new ones.

The same is true coast to coast, and the reason is simple. The Navy is ordering fewer and fewer new ships these days. It plans to build five ships in 2003 and seven in 2004. In contrast, during the Reagan era, the Navy was building 35 vessels per year.

Since then, the size of the U.S. fleet has shrunken from 580 ships to 308 this year and is expected to drop to 291 by fiscal year 2006. Meanwhile, the remaining vessels--fighting a war on terrorism and preparing for conflict with Iraq--are working harder than they have in years, according to Adm. Vein Clark, chief of naval operations.

"Today, there are 151 ships on deployment, fully half of the Navy," he told the House Armed Services Committee in late February. "A greater percentage of our ships are underway than at any time in the last dozen years.

To help the vessels stand up to this heavier workload, the Navy has increased its emphasis on ship maintenance. In its fiscal year 2003 budget, the Navy added $3.4 billion to its operations and maintenance and working capital accounts. "Last year, we reduced our major ship depot maintenance backlog by 27 percent," Clark said. An additional 32 vessels received repairs, he said.

Many ships need only routine maintenance. Others-particularly older aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships, nearing the end of their 30-year service lives--often require urgent, unplanned repairs.

Some ships still in their middle age are being converted to perform new missions. Beginning later this year, four Trident submarines will begin replacing their nuclear munitions with conventional, precision-guided Tomahawk cruise missiles. They will also be outfitted to transport special operations forces for clandestine missions. Starting in fiscal year 2004, Aegis-class cruisers will begin receiving new land-attack, force-protection and air-defense technologies.

With all of this activity, then-Navy Secretary Gordon R England told a 2002 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing that, despite the lull in new shipbuilding "there is substantial work in many of the nation's shipyards."

A recent tour of Hampton Roads' shipyards seemed to bear that out. Hampton Roads is a duster of ports, including Norfolk, Portsmouth and Newport News. Situated at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, Hampton Roads has been a shipbuilding site since Revolutionary War days. Today, it hosts:

* Naval Station Norfolk, homeport to 75 ships of the Atlantic Fleet.

* Norfolk Naval Shipyard, the Navy's oldest shipyard.

* Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding, the nation's sole builder of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and one of only two U.S. shipyards capable of making nuclear-powered submarines.

* Several other major shipyards that specialize in maritime repairs and maintenance work.

Last October, one of those companies--Norfolk Shipbuilding and Drydock Corp., subsidiairy of United Defense--won two contracts potentially worth nearly $90 million to provide repairs and maintenance for several Navy ships.

The largest contract, $64 million if the Navy exercises all options, is for six dock landing ships, better known as LSDs, all home-ported in Norfolk. They include the USS Whidbey Island, USS Oak Hill, USS Gunston Hall, USS Ashiand, USS Tortuga and USS Carter Hall.

The contract calls for Norshipco to perform pier-side and dry-dock work, repairs to hulls and mechanical and electrical systems, ship alterations for modernization and habitability and other chores required by emergencies.

The second contract, which could exceed $25 million, is for the USS Seattle, a Norfolk-based, fast combat support ship. Norshipco is providing dry docking, structural, piping, machinery and electrical repairs and interior preservation work.

"We're hiring right now, and so is everybody else," said Norshipco's Thomas W. Epley, president and general manager. But he told National Defense that he wasn't sure how long it would last. "This business is peaks and valleys all the rime. Four weeks for now, I probably won't have very much work for those people."

To help minimize the peaks and valleys, some of the smaller shipyards are forming teams to do jobs too large for any of them to handle on their own. In October, for example, three companies joined forces to perform a major package of badly needed repairs on the USS John F. Kennedy.

The 35-year-old Kennedy, one of three conventionally powered aircraft carriers remaining in the Navy, just returned from a six-month deployment in the Arabian Sea. In addition, she has a long list of maintenance needs dating back a decade or so.

Under the current contract, the carrier is receiving $218 million in maintenance work to be completed by the end of the fiscal year. The work--known in Navy jargon as an "extended selected restricted availability"--is being performed at the ship's homeport, Mayport Naval Station, Fla., so crewmembers won't have to be separated from their families so soon after deployment.

Navy's Choice

The Navy usually prefers to perform maintenance and repairs at or near a ship's homeport. Occasionally however, it decides otherwise. After the Aegis guided missile destroyer USS Cole was damaged badly in a 2000 terrorist attack in Yemen, the Navy sent her back to the shipyard where she was built--Ingalls Shipbuilding, in Pascagoula, Miss.--for patching up, rather than to her homeport, Norfolk. Ingails, now a division of Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corporation, was selected because it had the most workers experienced with Aegis-class destroyers to do the repairs, according to a Navy spokesman.

The Kennedy project is an enormous undertaking for Mayport, said David Phillips, deputy superintendent of ships for Jacksonville, Fla. "It is the largest carrier availability to date to be performed outside a public shipyard," he said. "It is a huge amount of work that it is three times the average of what the port normally does."

During the project, more than 435,000 man-days--the equivalent to 12 years of work--are being compressed into a 10-month schedule, Phillips said.

The three firms cooperating on the job are Norshipco; Earl Industries LLC, of Portsmouth, and Atlantic Marine and Drydock Inc., of Jacksonville. In addition, Norshipco has subcontracted with North Florida Shipyards Inc., also of Jacksonville, to provide local labor, supervision, production support and coordination.

The work includes repairs to almost every facet of the ship. Some examples: Norshipco is upgrading weapons, fire-protection systems, escape scuttles and weapons elevators. Earl Industries is repairing plating, tanks, armored ballistic doors, armored flight deck hatches, vents and ducting, and deck covering. Atlantic Marine and Drydock is working on vertical stores conveyors, aircraft elevators, air conditioning systems, fire-main valves and hangar bay divisional doors.

Cooperating on big, complex projects makes sense for shipyards, said Jerrold L. Miller, president of Earl Industries. "Each has strengths that the others don't have. This gives us a chance to maintain our strengths, while sharing the work."

Following the Work

Earl has facilities in Portsmouth, San Diego and Atlantic Beach, Fla., but it has no shipyard of its own to maintain. Instead, Earl performs work in shipyards owned by the Navy and other corporations. "We go to where the work is," said Miller.

Earl specializes in metal welding, brazing, fabrication and preservation. One of its subsidiaries, United Coatings, is experimenting with ultra high-pressure water blasting as a way to reduce the environmental impact of removing paint and other coatings from ship surfaces.

United uses a HydroCat, a self-contained robot "that actually climbs along the side of a ship," to spray water at pressures exceeding 25,000 PSI, removing debris and transferring it to a filtration unit, Miller explained. The filtration system separates the water and solid wastes, allowing for safe disposal of the wastes, he said.

Another Norfolk shipyard, Metro Machine Corp., has installed a stare-of-the-art dry dock to improve its competitive edge. With a lift capacity of 40,000 tons, the new Romanian-built dry dock--dubbed "Speede"--is three times the size of the old one, according to Paul Reason, Metro Machine's president and chief operating officer.

Speede "brought us into this century," Reason said. "We cut out teeth on amphibious ships, but those ships are getting larger and larger. We needed a larger dry dock to continue doing the work."

Northrop Grumman's Newport News division is the only shipyard in the nation that can perform maintenance on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. In 2002, it received a one-year, $191 million contract to work on the USS Enterprise. The work was to include routine dry dock, tank blasting and coating, hull preservation, propulsion and ship repairs, and limited enhancements to hull, mechanical and electrical systems.

That same year, Newport News also landed a $42 million contract to continue planning the overhaul and refueling of the USS Carl Vinson, which is scheduled for 2004. The contract calls for Newport News to provide advance planning, design, documentation, engineering, material procurement, shipboard inspections, fabrication and preliminary shipyard or support-facility work.

In February, Newport News received yet another contract, this one for $23 million in dry dock work on the nuclear-powered submarine USS Minneapolis-St. Paul. The contract--scheduled for completion in June--includes replacement of the tail shaft, removal and overhaul of the main and auxiliary sea valves, repair of all external and internal tanks, torpedo systems, sail and pressure and non-pressure hulls.

It has been nearly 10 years since Newport News received a contract for this kind of work, said Becky Stewart, program director for surface ship and submarine fleet maintenance. "This contract will help reestablish Newport News as another key resource to the Navy for large, complex submarine fleet maintenance work," she said.

Like other industries, shipyards are under pressure to reduce the impact of their activities upon the environment. In 2000, the Elizabeth River Project recognized Norshipco as a "river star" for its efforts to improve the health of the river, which flows by the shipyard.

The company was credited with playing a leading role in developing treatment technologies for removing up to 99 percent of TBT (tributylin) from shipyard washwater.

The company also has found environmentally acceptable ways to reuse wastes that previously were sent to landfills for disposal. Spent abrasives, for example, are now mixed with soil and used as road construction material. Paint wastes are used as fuel for cement kilns.

Norshipco spent about $2.5 million to clean up the yard, paving more than 46 acres of parking lots and 2.3 miles of roads to reduce pollution from storm water runoff. Employees even helped create a wetland along a 400-foot section of the river shoreline.

"Walking around this facility, you'll find this is one of the cleanest shipyards anywhere," said Epley.

While competition for ship-repair and maintenance work is fierce, such contracts are not enough "to sustain a robust shipbuilding industrial base over the long term," said U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee.

"There are currently only six major shipyards engaged in new construction of ships for the U.S. Navy," he told a congressional hearing. Those six shipyards are owned by just two corporations, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Corporation, of Falls Church, Va. "It has become increasingly difficult to support these facilities with the low level of Navy shipbuilding over the past decade," Weldon said.