Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Marinette, WI: Fincantieri Marinette Marine Shipbuilding

(Satellite)

A 1:52 video of the launching of the US Coast Guard Mackinaw.
 
MightyMac.org - The Mackinac Bridge & Straits of Mackinac posted
The christening and splash launch of WLBB 30, Coast Guard Cutter Mackinaw was 18 years ago today at Marinette Marine's Wisconsin shipyard. The photo here was taken from the Michigan side of the river. More photos:
 http://www.mightymac.org/mackinawlaunch3.htm
Nick Gilgenbach shared
Last ever side launch at Mmc is mid this month [Apr 2023].

Two of four photos posted by Sarter Marine Towing with the comment: "launch day." 
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A video of the Jan 19, 2020, launching

I learned about Marinette Marine from the following post. I already knew about Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding (FBS) on the east shore of Green Bay. It appears that this shipbuilding facility takes advantage of the St. Lawrence Seaway and builds Freedom-variant Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) for the US Navy. I remember watching a show on the Science Channel that these boats are designed for near-shore operations and that they can go fast. That is why they use jet propulsion. From my study of FBS, I know that Fincantieri is an Italian company. I wonder how many US Navy secrets are now known by Italy.
Jeff Griffith posted
It was my last couple of months before retirement from FEDEX in April of 2012, and I was fortunate to be present to watch as the USS Fort Worth enter the Menominee River via the 1st Street bridge. This was one of 4 prototypes of Littoral Combat Ships built by then Marinette Marine. It had just returned from a shake-down run on Green Bay. Notice the crowded bow full of contractors and press.
Mike Haase: Ships with no real purpose.
Steve Ebels: Mike Haase Except perhaps providing a distractionary target...
Mike Haase: Steve Ebels Maybe.
Bill McCall: Are they done building them in Marinette?
Brian R. Wroblewski: Bill McCall hopefully.
Ryan Chapman: They are being decommissioned and replaced. Horrible waste of tax dollars.
Aleck Green: Two of those in Escanaba now. Contractors are getting paid!!
Brian R. Wroblewski: She's already done for believe it or not.

Because Google's Sep 2020 software has made adding photos with captions so painful, I'm recording just the links of some LCS activity. 
I found some more links.
  • A video of LCS23 being launched.
  • LCS19 leaving town for the final time including a photo of it going past the drawbridge. One photo shows a lot of black smoke coming out of the exhaust. But later photos show it running clean.
  • LCS21 also has a drawbridge shot.
  • A video of LCS25 being launched.
  • Some "mods" coming to town:1 and 2.
Twelve photos of ships docked at the shipyard and an old freighter that is docked on the Menominee, MI, side of the river.

I was thinking it was nice to see a Midwestern state getting some military money. But the LCS contract winds down in two years and the shipyard was facing a shutdown. But in May 2020, FMM was awarded a $5.5b Navy contract to build FFGX frigates. [GreenBayPressGazette, paycount]
Painting from FMM via GreenBayPressGazette, paycount

The design is based on the FREMM ship which Fincantieri has already built for the Italian and French navies. "The new frigate will be much larger than the LCS ships, at 496 feet in length, 65 feet across the beam and accommodating a crew of 200. It will be able to sustain speeds of up to 26 knots." Roughly 1,000 new workers will be added to the current work force of 2,500. There are also 200 Northeastern Wisconsin subcontractors that will benefit from the contract. The contract should ensure jobs for 20 more years. [GreenBayPressGazette]

A FREMM frigate via GreenBayPressGazette

I noticed that this government financed ship was also built in this shipyard.
Chris Mazzella posted three photos with the comment: "Coast Guard Cutter Spar on her first trip to Chequamegon Bay. Built in Marinette, WI in 2000 and spent the last 20 years based in Kodiak, Alaska. Last yr she sailed to Baltimore for a major overhaul and has switch places with the Coast Guard Cutter Alder and is now based in Duluth."
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MN C-Patch commented on Chris' post
Here is the USCGC Spar tied up at the US Naval Academy in early March after its refit at Curtis Bay in Baltimore and just before heading to Duluth. It's departure was delayed a few days due to a nasty Nor-Easter up along the New England coast.
 
I'm reminded that Fincantieri is an Italian company.
Ralph Muccilli posted, cropped
Got a Saltie in Port in Marinette WI. Supposed to be unloading ship parts from Italy I read. Got another ship anchored out in the bay off the mouth of the Menominee River but do not.know what ship it is...
[I have already noted Caroline because it has the pilothouse on the bow.]
Blake Biermann: Looks like the MV Caroline. Flagged in Antigua & Barbuda

Ralph commented on Blake's post
Yup. Forgot to add her name. Also a very interesting bridge/forward accomodations set up. I should have akso got a photo of her Port side to illustrate.
This is a stock photo that explained to me what looked like a weird configuration to the bridge.
It makes sense seeing the forward crane secured for transit.
[MarineTraffic]

(new window)

(new window)    And the YouTube AI offers more videos.

Robinson Micheal shared a YouTube link about the expansion for the frigate contract. and a YouTube link to the deputy program manager for LCS project. Mobile, AL, also builds these ships. Another clip about the frigate, I don't understand the jargon concerning the design.

Gary Banks shared with the comment: "A new littoral combat ship was splashed today [May 7, 2022] in Marinette Wisconsin"
Gary Schweitzer: Just as the first few of the same class of ship are being decommissioned; how ironic is that.
Gerry Banks: Holly Marie side launches are pretty rare now.
Brian R. Wroblewski: Probably leave & go right to it's decommissioning ceremony like the rest of the class.

A 9:44 video about retiring 10 Freedom-class ships while building 6 more. The class has a gearbox design that doesn't work, a modular design that doesn't work, modules that don't work and a crew size that had to be increased. The 6 new ships are supposed to have a fixed gearbox and combat solutions proven by Great Britain. Building a ship with too many untested designs also doomed the Zumwalt class of destroyers to failure.

This is the 16th, and last, of the Freedom Class of Navy ships, which are already obsolete. And it is the last that is going to be launched sideways, which is good because they screwed up this one. The ship did hit the tugboat. Fortunately, the deckhands ran and then hung on and avoided injury.
safe_image for Launch of the Cleveland (LCS-31) A NEAR FATAL DISASTER!
lora jorgensen: A female friend of mine and a family member are deckhands on the Gaynor. They were on board for this launch. Both said that it was a terrifying experience and that there was a miscommunication with the shore crew…that they released the ship prematurely which created an extremely dangerous situation for the crew on the tug. I’m glad everyone was ok.

What's Going on With Shipping's 8:15 video about this launch

Jun 2023: Congress has agreed that the Navy can decommission all of the Littoral Combat Ships.  [video]

A 29:05 video summarizing the problems of the LCS program: "8 Things You Need to Know About the Navy’s Failed Multibillion-Dollar Littoral Combat Ship Program"

John Koster posted
North shore marine terminal Escanaba hauling a bow section of a LCS from sturgeon bay to marionette the part was 500 tons
Brady Cunningham: What for?
John Koster: Brady Cunningham LCS combat ships that there building at marinette.
[I hope this part is for the new class of ship that they are supposed to build. I just [Apr 2024] read that they are already behind on delivering that ship.]
Brian R. Wroblewski: When was this? Those ships are all fitting out now, unless this is for the Saudi version.
John Koster: Brian R. Wroblewski We hauled it in the first week of November.
[November makes more sense. It must have been for the last of the LCS disaster.]
Kevin Olds: It will be commissioned and immediately be decommissioned the Navy has given up on all LCS’s. What a waste of tax dollars.
The LCS’s area complete failure. Both versions. Political influence is causing the contract to be built out. Only for them to mothballed.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-navy-spent-billions-littoral-combat-ship
Al Zuraski: It's the bow of a Frigate built in sturgeon bay going to Marinette to build a ship, green bay builds the upper structure all aluminum. Than all put together in Marinette.
Wait probably a nose to a Saudi ship, #3 of 4.
For sure no more LCS will be built.
3 shipyards work together now, nose in s.b., alumn. in g.b. rest in marin. put together in marinette.
Edward Belmore: Al Zuraski I think the frigates have been delayed 3 years last I read!
Al Zuraski: yes but they are working on them, i work there.
[Part of the blame for the delays is the Navy. They don't have the design complete before the shipyard starts building.]

Nate Price commented on John's post

Janey Anderson posted three photos with the comment:
Turning the tide: The shipbuilding company reviving a small Midwest town

Italian-owned Fincantieri is tapping into the US naval shipbuilding market – and breathing life back into Wisconsin in its slipstream.

Wisconsinites are well accustomed to harsh winters but the deep freeze that descends upon the northern part of the Midwestern US in the first months of the year can test even the hardiest. When the temperature dips to minus 34C, schools close and workplaces shutter. Yet in tiny Marinette, a town on the icy shores of Lake Michigan, some 2,000 welders, fitters and engineers report for work as usual to build the next generation of American warships.

Founded in 1942 to bolster the US Navy’s war effort, today the Marinette yard is helmed by Italy’s state-owned shipbuilders Fincantieri, which acquired this frozen outpost in 2009. It’s a far cry from Fincantieri HQ in Trieste, which launches ships into the much more clement Adriatic Sea, but it has caught the changing tide of a once-dying American industry and is investing in the Rust Belt.

Fincantieri is the largest shipbuilder in Europe and owns an integrated network of yards from Genoa to Palermo, which churn out cruise ships, submarines, off-shore wind-support vessels and luxury yachts. Over the past 20 years, however, it has expanded its reach across four continents with 18 shipyards. In 2009 the firm’s CEO Giuseppe Bono, eager to break into the market of Nato’s largest naval power, spotted an opportunity that larger US shipbuilders had overlooked: a somewhat forlorn outpost on Wisconsin’s Great Lakes, which had access to the Atlantic Ocean and several modest contracts with the US Navy. Fincantieri acquired Marinette Marine that year, along with another shipyard 35km across the water in Sturgeon Bay, for $120m (€115.6m). Since then, the firm has invested $400m (€369m) in new facilities and infrastructure, with climate-control systems that keep the assembly lines at 15C even in the dead of winter.

“We’ve never lost a day due to bad weather,” says Marco Galbiati, CEO of Fincantieri Marine Group, the firm’s US subsidiary. In tailored houndstooth trousers, black loafers and white dress shirt, the Italian executive sticks out among his fleece-clad Midwest counterparts. Nevertheless, he is at home in the shipyard and is proud to give Monocle a tour of the expanding facility. In a hangar-sized building, we watch as hunks of steel are cut and welded onto a gargantuan hull destined for a ship in Saudi Arabia’s naval fleet. Then we are ushered into an even more cavernous space completed last year to accommodate Fincantieri’s mammoth new project: the construction of the US Navy’s first Constellation-class guided-missile frigate, the skeleton of which is taking shape before our eyes.

Galbiati, who worked his way up Fincantieri’s corporate ladder in Italy before moving to Washington, makes regular visits to Wisconsin to ensure that the company’s trademark “system of yards” process of shipbuilding is working smoothly. “The idea of ‘system of yards’ is about flexibility and to smooth out the peaks and valleys of shipbuilding production,” says Galbiati. In practice, this means that a facility in Sturgeon Bay cranks out ships’ bows while a purpose-built aluminium construction plant in Green Bay fabricates the superstructure. These modules are then shipped by barge to Marinette, where they are welded together into a hull.

This multi-site production process happens in the same way whether it’s at the Great Lakes or between Fincantieri’s cruise ship-manufacturing shipyards on the Adriatic. It’s what has turned the storied company into a true global powerhouse – and a potential saviour of US shipbuilding as it attempts to recapture its glory days. “We build for customers who need complicated ships that require skilled workforces,” says Mark Vandroff, the outgoing CEO of Fincantieri Marinette Marine, which operates the shipyard. The only type of seaworthy vessel that Fincantieri doesn’t make, he explains, is container ships. “We don’t build boxes to haul boxes.”

Shipbuilding was once a symbol of American industrial might. During the Second World War, the US built aircraft carriers in a matter of months. Today a new carrier takes eight years. But from its lowest point in the 1980s, when some 40,000 production jobs disappeared, shipbuilding is now a rare subject of bipartisan agreement in Washington. The Navy’s $1trn (€962bn) procurement plan calls for more than 100 new vessels over the next 30 years, and production is expected to peak in the next decade. This presents a lot of potential work for a dwindling number of active shipyards.

From Saab to Hyundai, foreign firms have been lining up to enter the world’s biggest defence market. But getting on the Pentagon’s books is notoriously difficult, especially in an industry dominated by large, historic US players. Wisconsin might be out of the way, with ports that freeze over for three months of the year, but the Marinette shipyard has allowed Fincantieri to get a firm foothold in the US market. All of this makes it well-positioned to tap into a lucrative revival of the industry.

When it took over the shipyard in 2009, Fincantieri inherited a contract to build 16 nimble, multipurpose craft for the Navy’s littoral combat ship (LCS) programme. While the LCS was ultimately a choppy project, it required Fincantieri to hire 1,000 people in the US, and proved to the Navy that it could build at scale. This helped Fincantieri land a bonanza deal to build 10 frigates worth $5.5bn (€5.3bn) in 2020 and has ensured steady work for decades to come. It will need to recruit another 500 workers over the next two years to ramp up the construction efforts that have re-energised this Rust Belt town. “In this area, either you work here, your family works here or your best friend works here,” says Fincantieri’s Bethany Skorik, a Marinette local.

Today the shipyard looks very different from when Fincantieri took over. The company is bringing state-of-the-art shipbuilding practices across the Atlantic. These include importing a measure of automation – which proved effective in Italy to recruit younger welders by offering work that couples traditional skills with new technology – and recent innovations that reduce the physical demands of shipbuilding, such as installing exoskeletons to help with the backbreaking work of painting gargantuan hulls.

Shipbuilding remains an intense job: manoeuvring steel sheets weighing upwards of 1,800kg with the help of magnetic cranes and welding with blowtorches that send sparks flying. Nevertheless, these jobs are a chance to pursue the American dream. A high-school diploma is sufficient to land a steady job at the shipyard with wages that can support a family and pay for a house. The so-called Badger State of Wisconsin runs the oldest technical college system in the US and a marine trade school sits just outside Fincantieri’s gates in Marinette. The company is recruiting at full speed across the state as the market for skilled tradespeople is extremely tight.

There are only about two dozen people from the parent company in Wisconsin – a mix of Italians, Norwegians and Romanians – but many more come for multiweek rotations. It means that there’s now an espresso machine installed in the Marinette corporate office alongside the pot of filter coffee, and that a nearby food shop stocks San Pellegrino. Americans who have never travelled abroad are sent to Italy for training. “It’s been such a change for a small town in Wisconsin that didn’t have an international footprint,” says Skorik. “People are much more open-minded. You’ll even hear Wisconsinites speaking a bit of Italian.”

Source: The Monocle - Writer Gregory Scruggs
Photographer Jesse Chehak

April 26, 2025
#shipjunkies
Ted G. Wagner: Fincantieri has completely fd up the Constellation project and are within a few weeks of having their funding frozen for not meeting deadlines thanks to micromanagement, from itself and the USN.
Gerry Banks: Ted G. Wagner Actually its a typical mess made by the navy. Insisting on starting the build before the design is finished creating delays in the build while the planners work out the design.
They did exactly the same when building the ARS and MCMs here.
Ted G. Wagner: Gerry Banks and lcs
Brian R. Wroblewski: The problems with LCS get blamed on them but it was the Navy's doing & unfortunately they're doing it all over again with the new Constellation class frigates right now.




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