Friday, December 5, 2008
Houston Business Journal - by Ford Gunter
houston.bizjournals.com

Ship comes in for Pileco with channel aid restoration deal

Using equipment supplied by a Houston company, the U.S. Coast Guard restored more than 700 damaged or destroyed ship channel markers in the Houston/Galveston/Texas City/Freeport area less than a month after Hurricane Ike hit - the largest aids-to-navigation restoration operation in Coast Guard history.

Ike affected 718 aids-to-navigation, 58 percent of the total, sending the Coast Guard and its fleet scrambling, including several construction tenders each outfitted with a pile-driving apparatus made by Houston-based foundation equipment manufacturer Pileco Inc.

"This is the first time that we’ve had multiple ranges down," Tyler Young, senior petty officer on the tender Clamp, said on a Coast Guard-produced video about the restoration posted on YouTube. "The wind damage and the surge actually took out every single range throughout the Galveston Bay and Texas City channel."

Vital to incoming and outgoing ships, aids-to-navigation, or ATONs, can consist of signs, lights, horns, batteries and communications devices, or any combination of the three, atop one or more 60-foot wood pilings, driven 10 to 15 feet into the mud on the channel bed.

LeRoy Wesatzke, Pileco vice president and chief manufacturing officer, says there were 200 vessels that couldn't enter the port after Ike came ashore on Sept. 12 because the markers were knocked down.

"Some were single (pilings), some were multiple structures - a 'range,' with lights and solar batteries," he says.

Coast Guard Cmdr. Hal Pitts, Sector Houston-Galveston, says the Coast Guard was on the scene the day after the storm moved through.

"Between 14 Sept. and 10 Oct. we had restored 701 of 718 aids-to-navigation discrepancies," he says.

The Coast Guard deployed five construction tenders - including the Clamp and the Hatchet — four other tenders and six ATON teams with 10 boats each to cover a swath of destruction from Lake Charles, La., to Matagorda.

Within three days, 85 percent of all damaged ATONs were restored in the Houston/Galveston/Texas City/Freeport waterways. In that same time frame, the Coast Guard restored 68 percent of all ATON discrepancies in Sabine, on the Louisiana border, and 34 percent in the Calcasieu waterways near Lake Charles, reopening the waterways to deep-draft commercial craft.

It was an essential job, and a timely one, considering the Coast Guard estimates that the ports directly affected by Ike account for a cargo volume greater than the ports of South Louisiana, New York City, New Jersey and Long Beach, Calif., combined.

PILE IT ON

Pileco has been exclusively supplying the Coast Guard with hammer set-ups for installing ATONs since the 1970s. Since being acquired by German holding company Bauer AG in 2005, Pileco has moved most of its manufacturing operations from Berry Road in North Houston to Bauer’s new facility in Conroe.

Wesatzke says Pileco signed a new contract with the Coast Guard in 1988 for 20 pile-drive set-ups, which usually have a 20-year service life. Instead of replacing them all at once, Pileco is doing it piecemeal.

"Recently we've sold them seven brand-new machines," Wesatzke says. "We're working on another four. We're going to try to get all of them."

The rigs, which run between $40,000 and $50,000 each, depending on the price of steel, are temporary fixtures on the tenders, able to "lay down" for storage.

Another Houston company, Energy Cranes LLC, supplies the cranes for the set-ups.

Since being acquired by Bauer three years ago, Pileco has seen its revenue jump from $12 million a year to an estimated $99 million for 2008. Similarly, the number of employees has grown from 28 to 70, spread across Houston, Conroe, California, Florida and Panama.