After days of waiting for the seas off Block Island to calm, Deepwater Wind on Sunday finally installed the first foundation for the five-turbine wind farm it's building in waters off Block Island.
Within minutes of the steel latticework structure being lowered into the Atlantic Ocean waters about three miles southeast of the island at 2:30 p.m., Jeffrey Grybowski, chief executive of Providence-based Deepwater, tweeted a photo of the moment and announced that the company had reached a milestone known in the offshore energy industry as "steel in the water."
Grybowski observed from a boat as the Weeks 533, the largest floating revolving crane on the East Coast, lifted the approximately 440-ton "jacket" up from a transport barge, and then, after the barge moved out of the way, slowly lowered the piece into the water. The whole process took about half an hour.
"It was a very big moment," Grybowski said as he talked by phone from the Southeast Light on Block Island, where he was watching the work progress after returning to shore.
It came just in time for Deepwater, too. On Monday, the company is taking Governor Raimondo, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, Rhode Island's congressional delegation and other officials out to the site of the wind farm by ferry to celebrate the start of offshore construction on the first-in-the-nation project.
Last Thursday, rough seas forced Deepwater to bring the barge carrying the foundation pieces into calmer waters off the Quonset Business Park in North Kingstown for rigging work that couldn't be done earlier because of the conditions off Block Island. The barge was towed back to the project site Saturday morning.
Crews from Weeks Marine, of New Jersey, and Manson Construction, of Seattle, were set to spend the rest of Sunday afternoon positioning the foundation in the right place. The four legs must be in particular pre-determined locations to ensure that the piles driven through them avoid boulders and any other geologic obstructions, said Grybowski.
The piles will be stabbed into the tubular legs as soon as Monday and then hammered down up to 200 feet into the ocean floor on Tuesday or Wednesday.
One of the key jobs on Sunday, said Grybowski, fell to a pair of workers who climbed to the top of the foundation while it was still on the transport barge and attached it to rigging hanging from the hook of the crane.
They were about 125 feet above the water as the barge rolled in seas that were milder than last week, but still pretty choppy. As the tip of the foundation rocked back and forth, they had to reach overhead to make the connection.
Like many of the workers hired by Weeks and Manson for the project, the two men are from Rhode Island and members of construction unions, said Grybowski.
"I don't know if they volunteered or were selected, but that was a critical piece of this," he said. "They're getting dinner on Deepwater for sure."
(c)2015 The Providence Journal (Providence, R.I.)
