Bull Arm Fabrication Site Dry Dock in Mosquito Cove, Newfoundland

Abstract

The Bull Arm Fabrication Site is a world class facility built in Mosquito Cove, Newfoundland and Labrador in the 1990’s as a construction site for the first Gravity Based Structure based oil production platform on Canada’s Grand Banks known as Hibernia. This huge multimillion dollar facility boasts: on site pipe and rebar fabrication, concrete batch plants, large module construction halls, and many other permanent facilities. Noticeably, one of the critical facilities seemingly missing is a functional and reusable dry dock. Each large project requiring such a facility must, at the project owner’s expense, create their own functional dry dock facility within Mosquito Cove. To date, the favoured solutions for the two largest mega projects constructed at Bull Arm has been a geotechnical solution with placed aggregate forming a bund wall or dyke around the cove and dewatering by pumping water out via crane emplaced temporary pumps. Is this current functional solution the best available? As of 2008 Nalcor Energy, the provincial utility and energy crown corporation, has been granted control of the facility and has touted a focus of continuous and concentrated work at the facility with little or no downtime The following paper will discuss the advantages of a temporary geotechnical solution with project descriptions of recent uses of this method. A focus on practicality, environmental issues, and possible upcoming projects will be discussed.