On Valentine’s Day, the new cruise dock float was scheduled to be delivered to Skagway’s Ore Dock redevelopment project. Measuring 500-by-50 feet, the float traveled from Anacortes, Washington. But disaster struck near Ketchikan when the float broke into three pieces.
Skagway’s assembly chamber was more crowded than usual at the Feb. 15 meeting and double the number of people watched on Facebook, as news broke that day of the cruise dock float mishap. Traveling from the manufacturer, Transpac Marinas Inc. in Anacortes, the crucial piece of infrastructure for the Ore Dock Redevelopment Project suffered damage near the end of its journey.
Borough Manager Brad Ryan described what happened.
“The barge was being held in the Ketchikan area, doing circles, waiting for the weather to calm down,” Ryan said. “And then it took off Monday morning to come up to Skagway. And sometime shortly after it took off Monday morning, I got a phone call that the dock had broken into two to three pieces and barges out there were wrangling the pieces. It turns out it was three pieces, which left one large intersection and two end pieces.”
According to Ryan, who immediately flew out to survey the damage, barges were able to tow all three pieces back to Ketchikan.
Ryan described the setback as a surprise. He had been following the float’s progress on his phone.
“Very unexpected in the sense we thought they’d made most of the big crossings, the big wider crossings,” said Ryan. “Surely by the time you get to Ketchikan, we were all feeling pretty good about it.”
But Ryan said the float is “fixable.”
“If we can source the metal plate for the new flanges and the pipe, they believe they can get these pieces manufactured and up to Ketchikan and installed in time to still have the dock come into Skagway before that mid-May ship,” Ryan said. “There’s always some caveats to that, you know, supply chain and those kinds of things. But they’re working on that already. And so, we’re working under that timeframe that we think we can still get it on before the first cruise ship.”
It’s not clear how much the dock breakup will cost the municipality. Ryan said the insurance companies are communicating. A special assembly meeting is scheduled for Feb. 22, after press deadline. Part of that meeting will be an executive session.
Mayor Sam Bass said while he is also hopeful Ore Dock will be ready to receive cruise passengers on time this spring, he and all necessary partners “will work to develop alternative options if that becomes necessary.”
