A factory designed to build factories
Published Saturday July 5th, 2008
Industry Modular construction yard brings back hundreds of good-paying jobs
BREWER, Maine. - The closure of the local mill is a familiar tale to New Brunswickers.
In Brewer, a city of 9,000 across the Penobscot River from Bangor, the paper mill is gone but hundreds of stable, good-paying manufacturing jobs are back.
The transformation of Brewer's defunct paper mill into a factory that builds factories serves as an example to New Brunswick communities - Dalhousie, Miramichi and Bathurst - struggling to find new uses for shuttered pulp and paper mills.
Steven Bost still remembers his first tour through the mothballed Eastern Fine Papers Inc. mill.
It appeared the sprawling complex had been hastily evacuated. Coffee cups sat half-filled and family photos still dotted employee desks.
"It was tragic to see that, to see the displacement of so many people," said Brewer's city manager.
The mill's closure left 430 people out of work.
Brewer was left without its largest taxpayer and employer.
"We had been operating hand-to-mouth," said Manley DeBeck, the last employee laid off at Eastern Fine Papers. "We'd started with three paper machines and we were down to one."
Brewer's straight-talking mayor had worked more than 18 years at the century-old paper mill when it closed in January 2004.
Many in the city knew the antiquated mill was in trouble, he said.
"Some people couldn't believe that the mill, which had been here for 125 years, was gone. It was really hard for the guys that worked there, especially those with small children."
Just over three-and-a-half years after the mill closed the buildings that once housed the paper machines and the boiler house have been torn down.
A renovated warehouse and administration building are the only traces of the old mill still standing on the 16.5-hectare site, now a modular construction yard.
The pain of losing the city's traditional industry has been replaced with joy as the site has found a new purpose under a new owner.
Renamed the Eastern Manufacturing Facility, what was an abandoned mill is now a beehive of activity.
In the construction yard, yellow heavy duty cranes hold grey steel beams aloft while workers weld them into place, creating the metal skeleton onto which pipes of all sizes and shapes, along with electrical wiring and complex machinery, will be built.
Each of the structures is a module, a piece of a much larger industrial puzzle.
The 54 modules being built here, once assembled together, will form the catalytic-cracker-feed hydrotreater and hydrocracker units for a $7-billion refinery expansion in Texas.
Each completed module, which can weigh more than six blue whales, will be loaded onto a barge and shipped down the Penobscot River, around the east coast of the United States, across the Gulf Coast until they arrive in Port Arthur, 146 kilometres east of Houston.
Eastern Manufacturing will employ roughly 500 people as it reaches peak capacity on the oil refinery contract. The facility is gradually increasing its efforts on the multi-million dollar project.
More than 200 workers are on the site now.
Peter Vigue, the 60-year-old chairman and chief executive officer of Cianbro Cos., the private, employee-owned firm behind the creation of Eastern Manufacturing, said the construction yard can build a wide variety of structures.
"We're already evaluating opportunities that would allow us to do modular construction of power plants ... the pharmaceutical industry, the nuclear power industry."
The well-known Maine business leader sits in a conference room inside Cianbro's corporate headquarters in Pittsfield, 60 kilometres west of Bangor, and explains why his firm chose to build its industrial modular construction yard at the former mill site in Brewer.
The company could have chosen any number of sites on the east coast that were easily accessible by land and sea.
Cianbro, as a local company, had an obligation to help Maine, said Vigue.
"It's the right thing to do," he said. "When you participate in the economy as a business you have to participate in society as well."
Cianbro decided to increase its modular manufacturing efforts after it finished the construction of two semi-submersible oil drill rigs in Portland - without a shipyard - and building North America's largest and most modern cement factory in 18 months, he said.
Modular construction represents a bright future for Cianbro and for Maine, said Vigue.
Cianbro, which has roughly 2,500 employees and is one of the U.S. East Coast's largest construction companies, does work building commercial and institutional properties, heavy industrial construction, transportation infrastructure, marine and energy sector projects.
The firm used to do more than half of its work in Maine's pulp and paper sector, installing new machines and upgrading or repairing existing equipment.
But as that industry struggled - it has thinned to 8,000 employees from 20,000 in the mid-1990s - Cianbro's main source of work began to dry up.
"We operate in 15 states," said Vigue. "But as it relates to Maine we had people resources but limited opportunity so we developed a strategy we call exporting our knowledge and our skill. In other words, let's bring projects to Maine, let's build them here and let's export them," said Vigue.
On Tuesday: How an innovative approach to community development, tax and grant programs and a commitment of a local business to its home state turned an outdated paper mill into a 21st century factory.
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