Assembly Required
Industrial-sized module construction requires acres of space, convenient port access, and precise fabrication. At Cianbro’s Eastern Manufacturing Facility in Brewer, those requirements are welded together on a daily basis.
The photo has already become iconic, though it’s less than 3 years old. To many Mainers, it represents the state’s can-do spirit in these early years of a new millennium. Taken from the air in March 2009, it shows a barge piled high with cubical modules passing underneath the Penobscot Narrows Bridge, heading for the open sea, and, eventually, to Port Arthur, Texas, where the modules were joined together like a giant 3-D puzzle.
Joseph Cote, vice president and general manager of Cianbro’s Eastern Manufacturing Facility in Brewer, thinks it’s pretty cool that the bridge and the modules beneath it were built by the same company. At the close of the 20th century, neither bridge nor modules, nor the busy construction operation Cote now supervises, existed.
“It’s nice when you can take a project that you built here, put it on a barge, and they go under a bridge that you built on the river,” he says.
The picture hangs on the wall of the conference room adjacent to Cote’s office, in one of the two brick buildings Cianbro kept and restored when it took over an abandoned paper mill on the Brewer side of the Penobscot. Eastern Fine Paper ceased operations here in 2004, leaving behind half-empty coffee cups in the buildings and half-buried hazardous waste in the yard.
The bankrupt paper company also left a hole in Brewer’s economy; 430 people lost their jobs, and the city faced the daunting prospect of cleaning up the 41-acre site and finding a productive use for it.
The project that launched the Brewer facility was an expansion of an already huge oil refinery owned by Motiva Enterprises, a joint venture between the Shell Oil Company and Saudi Aramco. At its peak, that project employed more than 700 welders, pipe fitters, crane operators, electricians, and other construction workers; 53 modules of varying sizes were shipped down the river, four or five at a time, over a period of about a year.
Now the yard has taken on two new projects, and steel is once again rising on the east bank of the Penobscot River.
“We build modules,” Cote says. “A module, in the context of what we do, can be anything. A module is a component to a much-larger-scale project.”
One module project Cianbro is working on now is for another refinery. The other is a large-scale undertaking for Vale, a Brazilian company building a nickel-processing plant in Newfoundland.
“We’re building electrical rooms for that facility,” Cote explains. “They’re stand-alone buildings, some of which could be two or three stories tall. Owner-furnished equipment will go inside. They’ll be weather-tight. We’ll ship them out the river and up to Canada.”
On a breezy day in midsummer, a team of welders is putting together a rectangular frame of galvanized steel beams, called a “bent,” for the Vale project. Two workers pull out a long tape measure and stretch it diagonally across the frame. “They’re checking to see if it’s squared off,” explains Roger Leach, safety manager at the yard. Accuracy is crucial—an error of as little as an eighth of an inch can render a 20-foot bent unusable.
The steel arrives by truck from Cianbro fabricating facilities in Pittsfield and Baltimore, Maryland. One truckload of steel looks insignificant against the piles of assembled bents and the steel structures rising against the sky.
It’s heavy stuff—one bent weighs 13,000 pounds. Once assembled, the bent is trucked to another part of the yard and then turned vertically by two cranes and lowered into place. Some of the finished buildings will be 75 feet tall.
“It would be more efficient to move it once, but we’re constrained by the space we have,” Leach says. The working yard takes up 39 acres of the 41-acre site. The rest is used for parking and administrative offices
Everything is planned backwards from the eventual placement of the modules on the barge that will ship them to Newfoundland. Utilizing global positioning system (GPS) technology, Cianbro engineers determine exactly where each module will be assembled, according to the order in which they will be placed on the barge. “They have different weights, different centers of gravity,” Leach explains. “It takes a tremendous amount of planning, and it involves a marine architect to get them on the barge exactly right. It can get very expensive if something’s not in the right place.”
The positioning has to be worked out before the steel even arrives at the yard. Once a module is ordered, it takes 10 weeks to buy and process the steel, which arrives in the form of galvanized beams. Bents are assembled and moved into place by cranes. Flooring is installed, then the interior walls and the siding.
But that’s just the framework. Inside the buildings, workers assemble a dizzying array of cable trays that look like conveyor belts that will carry electrical cables from control cabinets to pieces of equipment—all of which are meticulously labeled to correspond with exact engineering schematics. Cianbro electricians will then hook up all the cables—and there are thousands of them—to the piece of equipment each one goes to. It takes about three months to complete a module. A new one is started every two to three weeks, so that a visitor to the yard can see a series of modules in various stages of completion.
Subcontractors perform some of the specialized work, such as the finish roofing and siding. It makes sense, Cote says, for Cianbro to work with companies that do one particular thing well. Almost all the subcontracted work at the Brewer yard is done by local companies. An observer can quickly distinguish subcontractors from Cianbro employees: The Cianbro workers are the ones in the white hard hats, while the subcontractors wear blue.
The buildings are constructed atop iron pedestals, which allows the massive machine that loads them onto the barge to lift the buildings from underneath. Though it may seem hard to believe that a many-ton steel structure could be affected by wind, it’s true: Buildings of more than one story must be bolted onto heavy concrete blocks to ensure that they don’t tip over. “We went through all kinds of scenarios about how we were going to hold them down,” Leach says. “We looked at several different methods. One was using guy wires, another was putting anchors in the ground. But because this is a brownfields site, you never know what you’re going to hit.”
The five-year saga from abandoned mill site to working module yard is a success story of private-public partnership.
After Eastern Fine Paper closed in 2004, the city of Brewer acquired the land through foreclosure and formed a limited liability company, South Brewer Redevelopment LLC, to spearhead the cleanup. A planning grant was secured from the state. The funding process was complicated, but eventually the federal Department of Environmental Protection got involved, and Brewer secured a brownfields grant. (Brownfields are developable properties that are contaminated by pollutants or have other environmental issues that need to be addressed before they can be redeveloped.)
Originally, the plan was to convert the land to multiple use, including retail businesses and residences, says D’arcy Main-Boyington, Brewer’s director of economic development. But then Cianbro became interested, drawn by the proximity of deep water for shipping the oil refinery modules the company was negotiating to build.
“When they came and talked to us, they didn’t have a contract yet,” Main-Boyington says.
“We were having dialogue with Motiva on building modules,” Cote recalls. “They had a very large project to do. They came to us because of our culture, our ability to put a qualified workforce in place. We had the capacity and the ability to do the work, and we had the resources.” The only thing missing was a job site.
“Here’s Motiva and an agent looking for suitable yards to do the work, and they discover that they want to do business with us,” Cote says, “and we don’t have a yard. This is going to be the largest refinery in North America. This is huge. We had to convince ourselves that we were going to find a module yard, which we did, working closely with the city of Brewer and all the local stakeholders and our congressmen and senators and agencies, trying to pull this all together.”
Brewer officials were eager to work with them. “We’d had a prior relationship with Cianbro; they had built the Cianchette building (which houses Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems); we trusted them and they trusted us,” Main-Boyington says. Though another developer had been selected, the city brokered a deal that allowed Cianbro to move in and get to work.
When it happened, it happened quickly. “We started the transformation of the site in September 2007,” Cote says. “We had not yet signed a purchase order to build modules, but talks were well under way. We converted the yard from a paper mill to what it is today in nine months, the permitting and the dredging and the installation of the bulkhead and all of that.
The total cost of the cleanup and conversion came to just over $16.5 million. The city received a Phoenix Award from the EPA, a prestigious honor given to individuals and groups that “solve critical environmental challenges of transforming blighted and contaminated areas into productive new uses,” according to the EPA’s website.
Cianbro kept two buildings from the paper mill: the administrative building in which Cote and other executives have their offices, and a three-story building closer to the river, which houses, among other things, a training and lunch room that can seat 400. Other parts of the building will be used for warehousing and receiving, and engineering offices. On the ground floor, rows of locker-sized electrical control cabinets, supplied by Vale, sit shrink-wrapped on pallets until they are ready to be installed in the unfinished modules for the nickel mine. “We have to keep them in a dry place until they’re ready to be put out in the modules,” Leach says.
The rest of the old buildings were razed. Once the cleanup was complete, much of the rubble was buried on-site. A heavy haul road runs around the working pad’s perimeter. All of the electrical power lines and compressed air are buried in trenches underground, minimizing the chances of an accident. Thirteen kiosks around the site bring power to the surface. The yard is incredibly clean. It’s periodically swept with magnets to minimize the danger of stepping on sharp metal objects.
The “bulkhead” where the ships pull in has been dredged to a depth of 16 feet at low tide. Cianbro’s permit allows for dredging down to 26 feet, and Cote says the company might develop the waterfront further, “if there’s a project that calls for it.
The workday begins at 6:30 a.m. and runs to 5 in the afternoon, Monday through Thursday, with half an hour for lunch and overtime as needed. Each day begins with a meeting.
“Everybody on-site is there,” says production manager Roger Godin. “We try to share any company information from the previous day, any lessons learned. The foremen go over that day’s activity plan, and describe in detail the specific duties of the day.”
After the meeting, workers spend several minutes stretching, a process that’s repeated four times a day. After the noon lunch break, there’s another meeting. “We talk about communicating every day,” Leach says.
That philosophy is reinforced by signs in every building emblazoned with the phrase: “No one in this room is smarter than all of us.”
“That’s how we operate,” Cote explains. “Everybody has a lot of talent, knowledge, and know-how. Our goal is to bring it all together and use it to get the best end result.”
Cianbro president and CEO Peter Vigue says that the company’s goal is to bring more such projects to Maine and export them all over the world.
“Here in Maine, we have a tremendous asset: our skilled people,” says Vigue, who has been with Cianbro since 1970 and has served as its president since ’91. “When we built drill rigs in Portland, we found that a large percentage of our employees were coming from north of Augusta.”
Employment at the Eastern Manufacturing site fluctuates, depending on what’s going on when. Some 150 people are employed by the Vale project, a far cry from the 750-strong workforce that the Motiva project brought in, but Cianbro is a large company, with annual operating revenues in excess of $500 million and 1,500 employees, many of whom can move from job site to job site.
“The economy is cyclical; things are up, things are down,” Cote says. “But not everything is up or down at the same time. Because we’re so diversified, we can seek opportunities in different market sectors to help keep our workforce going. We can move the workforce around to meet the needs.”
Vigue is proud of the company’s safety record and its impact on the local economy. “We trained over 200 welders for the Motiva project,” he says. “Some of them were as young as 19 years old. And this was not your typical welding; we were using a lot of exotic materials from a metallurgy standpoint, a lot of stainless and titanium, material designed for high temperatures and high pressures.”
Cianbro is employee-owned, which means that every worker is also a shareholder, and the company has developed a “very significant wellness program,” including the establishment of tobacco-free workplaces in all its facilities.
As for the future, Vigue says four or five projects are “on the radar” for the Eastern Manufacturing Facility.
“We’re here to stay,” he says. “This market will be around for a long time.”
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Band of Brothers
Cianbro started with four brothers, but now there are hundreds in the family.
Cianbro’s fingerprints are all over Maine and New England, from the Piscatiqua River Bridge built on the Maine-New Hampshire border in the 1970s, to wind power projects on Vinalhaven and in Maine’s western mountains, to the soon-to-be-built auditorium approved by Bangor voters earlier this year.
But Cianbro’s influence doesn’t end there. From bridge construction and repair, to highway connectors, to semiconductor fabrication plants, to dams and containment facilities for nuclear waste—you name it, Cianbro has built it. “We operate in 40 states,” says CEO and president Peter G. Vigue.
Not bad for a company started by four ambitious brothers in Pittsfield, Maine.
Raphael Cianchette came to the United States on a boat from Naples, Italy, in 1906. In the mid-1930s, he opened a bridge construction company in Pittsfield, Maine. His four sons all worked in the business as teenagers. The company grew slowly until the start of World War II, when the entire workforce, including the sons, was drafted into the military. This happened in the middle of a major bridge construction project in Kittery. Cianchette finished the bridge, but closed his business and became deputy sheriff of Somerset County.
After the war, the oldest son, Carl, decided to revive his father’s business. He was soon joined by brothers Ken, Ival (“Bud”), and Chuck, and the four men incorporated their construction firm in 1949 as Cianchette Brothers, later shortened to Cianbro (pronounced CHIN-bro).
In the 1980s, Cianbro management made the decision to expand into other geographical areas. The company’s first acquisition was a site-development contracting company in Tampa, Florida. Soon afterward, Cianbro acquired Monroe Construction in North Carolina and began building high-rise commercial buildings. By the end of the decade, Cianbro was involved in a wide range of projects: hydro-electric dams in Vermont and New York, bridge reinforcement in Maryland and Virginia, a large warehouse in Connecticut, and a comprehensive water treatment project in Washington, D.C.
Even more ambitious projects followed. In the ’90s, Cianbro developed the Martian Bigfoot, the largest sphagnum-peat-moss-harvesting machine ever made.
Today, Cianbro continues to expand its international influence, importing steel from China for a Texas refinery and building modules for a Brazilian company operating in Newfoundland. “We’re an international company,” vice president and general manager Joseph Cote says, looking out his office window at the Penobscot River, “but our roots are right here in Maine.”
Company Brief: Cianbro – Pittsfield, Maine
Year founded: 1946
Employees: 1,500
Creation details: Started in Pittsfield, Maine, by Italian immigrant Raphael Cianchette in the 1930s; revived by his four sons following World War II, incorporated in 1949.
Annual operating revenue: In excess of $500 million
Markets: Modular construction, fabrication and coating, hydroelectric and dam, power and energy, industrial, marine structures and vessels, pulp and paper, transportation and infrastructure, commercial and institutional, water and wastewater.
Size of Eastern Manufacturing Facility: 41 acres
Positions: Engineers, estimators, project managers, foremen, drivers, welders, electricians, riggers, pipe fitters, crane and heavy equipment operators.
New projects: Electrical modules for nickel-processing plant; refinery modules.
Challenges: International competition, uncertain economy, regulatory issues.
To learn more: www.cianbro.com
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