PORT ANGELES — Leave it to the Port of Port Angeles to own a white elephant that’s painted robin’s egg blue.
That’s the actual problem: After its last owner discovered the cost to disassemble the chip-loading tower at Terminal 7, the company in effect said, “Leave it.”
Pinnacle of the port’s skyline — absent a visiting oil rig — it’s as unwelcome as it is unsightly.
But it could be gone as early as May, dismantled and sold at bargain-basement prices for scrap.
The deceptively spindly looking contraption is designed to load wood chips from trucks or conveyors, carry them high above the harbor, then spout them into the holds of bulk carrier cargo ships.
For you really old-timers out there, think Rube Goldberg overdosed on Ovaltine.
Daishowa America Ltd. once used the loader to pile and export wood chips. The paper mill closed its chip plant in 2001.
“I don’t know when they ceased to use it,” Chris Hartman, the port’s director of engineering, said last week.
“I remember as a kid seeing a mountain of chips down there.”
When the company, now Nippon Paper Industries USA, sold the 18-acre property to the port for $5.4 million in 2004, the chip loader went with the deal, along with its 410-foot-long pier.
Its days were numbered, though no one knew how high the number would climb.
By 2006, then-port Executive Director David Hagiwara had put the 650-ton apparatus up for sale.
“The conclusion was that piece of equipment isn’t suitable for current demands,” Hagiwara said then of the port’s plans to consolidate its log-handling operations onto the property.
The chip loader was put up for bid. It fetched $123,000 that August — the port netting $74,000 after auction expenses — from Chinook Ventures of Longview in a deal that called for its removal within 90 days.
But more than 1,000 days went by before the Peninsula Daily News would write that the Big Blue Thing remained on the harborfront in August 2009.
By then, Chinook Ventures was paying $5,000 on the loader, which wasn’t chipping in on the cost.
Hartman wasn’t sure when Chinook’s plans fell through, but he said it was when the company encountered the cost of removing it from wooden pilings over the water of Port Angeles Harbor.
The location triggers an avalanche of environmental regulations.
The port has applied for a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, the lead agency in the process that eventually will involve state and federal fish and wildlife agencies, Hartman said.
Because the site lies inside the harbor, Hartman hopes the port can avoid the “fish window” that allows such work over water only between July 15 and Feb. 15.
“If it’s not the case, we hope to begin around May,” he said.
By that time, however, the permitting process will have filled a loose-leaf notebook.
Where the chips have fallen, the tower will follow. Port officials hope — fervently — that the work can be done in conjunction with repairs to Terminal 1.
That’s because Legacy Contacting of Stayton, Ore., will bring with it both land- and barge-based cranes to perform $4,500,333 worth of work to replace two breasting dolphins — pilings that act as fenders — and a head-tie dolphin. The work is set to be finished in spring.
Hartman said removing the chip loader will cost $100,000 — but the price would have been prohibitive on its own.
The chip loader might bring just more than one-third that amount if the port sells it at Friday’s posted price of 3 cents per pound for scrap steel, according to the websites www.steelorbis.com and www.scrapmsc.com.
“Scrap steel prices are at a pretty extreme low at this time,” Hartman said.
The chip loader is composed of three separate frames and must be disassembled carefully to avoid demolishing the pier beneath it.
“It doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to remove,” Hartman said, “but it really is.
“Its distance from the shore out there on the pier makes it quite difficult.”
The deteriorating pilings beneath the pier make it harder yet, he said; they might not support more heavy equipment.
Once the chip loader is gone, how could the port use the pier?
“That’s unknown at this time,” Hartman said.
There’s potential for a barge dock, he said, “but the level of investment would be pretty extreme.”
The location is too shallow to dock a cruise ship, he said.
Besides, a cruise ship is huge.
And it’s white. And it draws crowds.
Say, it’s almost like a . . .
Oh, never mind.
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Reporter James Casey can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5074, or at jcasey@peninsuladailynews.com.
