A major project is underway at Halifax Shipyard. It involves filling the area where the floating drydocks were once located. The new space will measure 13 Acres, and will involve a seawall and considerable rock fill. A steady stream of dump trucks has been seen driving into the yard in recent weeks, but work is in the early stages, and there is not much to see yet.
Today (October 17) I noted a pair of very high mobile cranes were at work removing the boom from the last of the shipyard's tracked cranes. At one time the shipyard had more than half a dozen of these cranes, adjacent to the launch slips and in other locations, but they have gradually disappeared.
In my 1969 photo (above) during construction of oil rigs, one crane is positioned with its boom nearly horizontal, while handling some steel fabrication, and the cab and boom of another crane can be seen at the far left. Both cranes were on rails and could move back and forth along the length of the launchway.
In 1985 the cranes were at work on construction of Hull No. 72, the future CCGS Ann Harvey.
In those days the cranes had numbers.
Today a pair of (invisible) crawler cranes have taken the weight of Number 7's boom and later in the day, lowered it to the ground.
The last crane (Number 7 by my tally) served the old launchway which is no longer in use, and is therefore redundant.
The shipyard had up to three floating cranes at one time and apparently seven land-based cranes. Now with much of the work carried out indoors, they are no longer needed. Mobile truck-based or crawler cranes are called in if needed.
The next launch, scheduled for December, will see the fifth AOPV, the future Frédérick Rolette rolled onto the semi-submersible barge Boa Barge 37 (red hull in photo below) and transported to Bedford Basin where it will be floated off.
The only fixed crane remaining in the shipyard is a construction type tower crane (far right in photo).
The cranes were important tools in their time, and as the old saying goes, "their like will never be seen again."
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