Delayed caisson repairs leave ship repair contractors high and dry

THE vexing matter of the availability of Durban’s dry dock is again in the news, with Transnet National Ports Authority (TNPA) announcing that the completion date has been brought forward by one month to November 25.

Readers will recall that the dock has been unavailable to general shipping for a lengthy period of this year.

This was a result, firstly, of the several months that the SA Navy frigate, SAS Amatola, spent occupying the dock. More recently it has been the overdue repairs to one of the dock’s two caissons, which is now stretching to three months of unavailability.

The caissons, or lock gates, are the big pieces of equipment that form the gate used to open and close the dock. The Durban dock has two of them, one upfront at the dock entrance and the other which is used to divide the dry dock into two separate compartments, thus allowing two ships to be docked and repaired independently of each other.

The outer dock was declared faulty several years ago and was replaced by the inner dock, thus turning the dry dock into a single chamber.

Contract

It is the damaged outer gate that is now undergoing repair.

The ports authority issued a contract to Durban company Channel Construction to undertake the overhaul and extensive repair of the outer caisson. The original contract called for a two-month nonoperational period in August and September, followed by a partly operational period in October and November. That schedule was thrown out when the hospital ship, Africa Mercy, which was the last vessel to dock before the repair, encountered additional repairs that necessitated bringing spares from Europe, causing a two-week delay. As a result, the contract on the dry dock and gate only commenced on August 20, 2015, 21 days late.

“This delayed start impacted on the erection of scaffolding and the appointed contractor’s occupation of the dock, which had a direct knock-on effect on critical path activities and threatened to push the completion date of the project to December 24, 2015. Due to the time lost… it became apparent the contractor’s methodology would need to be changed,” said port manager Moshe Motlohi.

“We have tried to minimise any further impact on the ship repair industry by taking measures to bring the project completion date forward by a month, although the dock’s non-operational period has been extended from late October to also end on November 25, 2015.”

But Motlohi said that while the revised methodology should enable an earlier project completion date, it also posed what he described as serious risks associated with docking a vessel whilst the project was in progress. Ship repairers had wanted to be able to dock ships from early November by sharing the dock with the caisson but TNPA has ruled this out saying it was too dangerous. As a result dry dock bookings are only being accepted for dates after November 25, 2015.

Ship repair contractors say they had been assured the dock would be available from the end of October in a partly operational fashion, as per the original announcement, a date which Transnet has now postponed by a month on grounds of safety. They claim contracts worth millions of dollars for ship repair have been lost or turned away.

They say it would have been possible to dock a ship safely together with the caisson in the upper area of the dock where, they point out, the gate has been standing in the dock for a long time, during which other ships had been admitted for repair. But the gate wasn’t previously surrounded by scaffolding.

TNPA’s contract issued to Channel Construction called for a 24hour operation working day and night shifts seven days a week to enable an on-time completion of the contract. The scope of the work includes demolition and waste disposal, structural repair, welding, modification and replacement of structural members and plates, design and fabrication certification, commissioning and final handover.

The contract has a R30-million price tag.