Mar 25

Written by: Cianbro News
3/25/2009 3:12 PM

A crowd of about one hundred invited guests joined more than 400 Cianbro team members at a ceremony in Brewer, Maine, to commemorate the departure of the first refinery modules to be shipped from the Eastern Manufacturing Facility.  The loaded ocean going barge, the Columbia Boston, is scheduled to weigh anchor on Thursday morning, March 26th, at nine o'clock to begin a 2,300 mile voyage to the Gulf of Mexico.  Cianbro Chairman and CEO Peter Vigue presided over the ceremony, which included a blessing for the safe passage of the vessel and its crew.  Vigue also praised the cooperation from numerous entities, from Brewer city officials, to the owners of the Motiva refinery where the modules will operate, to the hundreds of Cianbro team members who built the modules.

"It's been seven months since we at Cianbro invited our friends and neighbors to visit our new facility at an open house, here at the site of the old Eastern Fine Paper Company in Brewer, back in the summer of 2008," said Vigue.  "On that warm sunny day in August, we told you that the time would come when we would put the final touches on gigantic pieces of an oil refinery, and ship them down the Penobscot River on barges, and then onward over 2,300 miles of ocean to their final destination in Texas.  Back in August, we wouldn't have blamed you if you had doubts that such a task could be accomplished.  It's not always easy to create clean, sustainable, high-tech, well-paying opportunities during a recession, especially in what seems to be a remote corner of the nation.  But, the time has come.  The dream has become a reality, and the proof is right before your eyes." 

Among the guests at today's event were Maine Governor John Baldacci, the mayors and city councilors of Brewer and Bangor , Maine, and the Regional Director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Site Remediation and Restoration.  The job site represents a model clean-up project conducted by the EPA, the City of Brewer, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, and Cianbro, which removed contamination left behind by the previous industry before the module facility was developed.

Click here to watch the slideshow.

Click here to read Pete Vigue's speech from the ceremony.

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