Port MacKenzie Takes On 16 Miles of Cement Pipe

Just brought in the Industrial Brio, is the name of the ship. It's a Panamanian-flagged ship. It picked up a shipment of pipe in Korea, took that to Mexico to have the pipe coated with cement, and then went to Louisiana, back through the Panama Canal, and up to Alaska, and just arrived this morning. We just finished tying it down. Took about 30 minutes to secure the vessel.

Everything went real smooth. Uh, we have approximately 16 miles of concrete-coated pipe that's going to be used for a natural gas pipeline that FERI is building about 16 miles northwest of Nokiski. It'll be an underwater pipeline running from their new natural gas platform to Nokiski. And so over the next 2 or 3 months, we're going to offload the whole ship here over the next week, stockpile the pipe on our barge dock, and then every 36 hours we'll load an OSV, an offshore support vessel, it's like a large landing craft, with about 60 pieces of pipe each time. They'll shuttle it down the inlet to the work barge that's welding the pipe together and laying it across the inlet.

So it'll take 2 or 3 months to complete the project.

Westpac was contracted to bring the vessel in, get it tied up, and we'll also be discharging the pipe, be doing the stevedore work, grounding the pipe over at a designated storage area, then later on reloading the pipe to offshore support vessels. Very important ship for Alaska. I think it establishes that Port McKenzie is a very good place for this type of cargo, we'll see more pipe come through here.