Book Review - The Yard by Michael S. Sanders

Midcoast Maine is one of my all-time favorite places, and I feel privileged to be able to call it "home." It's an area of tremendous physical beauty, with its rocky coastline, rolling hills, and small towns. I don't see how anyone driving along Maine's coast can fail to appreciate the rugged beauty and serene tranquility so readily evident throughout the area.

There's one anomaly in this otherwise gorgeous panorama of coastal Maine's undulating rural landscape. It's located in the city of Bath, along the western shores of the Kennebec River. Here can be found an industrial complex whose drabness evokes an image more than slightly reminiscent of America's 1970's "rust belt." It's the home of a company whose name - Bath Iron Works - suggests a steel mill or steel processing plant. However, the dominant features of Bath's skyline and shoreline - several gigantic cranes rising hundreds of feet into the air; a series of dreary and indiscriminately placed metal and brick buildings of various sizes and shapes; an enormous dry-dock floating in the Kennebec River, moored next to those metal and brick buildings; and a quartet of U.S. Navy destroyers in various stages of construction - give testimony to the fact that Bath Iron Works (BIW) is, in reality, a shipyard.

Bath Iron Works is one of only a handful of companies that builds surface combat ships for the U.S. Navy. BIW currently employs about 5,000 people, making it one of Maine's largest and highest paying private employers. It's the place where I found employment immediately after my retirement from the U.S. Air Force in 1997. And, it's also the subject of a book, published in 1999, and entitled The Yard: Building a Destroyer at the Bath Iron Works, by Michael S. Sanders.

The Yard tells the story of how the USS Donald Cook, an Arleigh Burke-class Aegis guided missile destroyer, was built in stages over the course of 18 months, from 1996 through 1998. The tale begins with a brief general overview of the basic design and capabilities of the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer (without, of course, venturing into classified or sensitive information).

Sanders explains in clear and concise layman's terms some of the basic stages of steel shipbuilding as practiced during the construction of the Donald Cook. The first was the design stage, where designers, planners, and engineers created the plans and drawings which eventually came to fruition in the completed ship. The fabrication stage followed, where massive hull sections, decks (floors), overheads (ceilings), bulkheads (walls), and other subassemblies were cut, shaped, bent, burned brazed, and otherwise prepared at the BIW Hardings Plant. Next stop was the assembly stage, where, inside the cavernous, quarter-mile long, 100-foot high Assembly Building, previously fabricated sections were assembled into immense multi-story erection units weighing as much as 200 tons. The process then continued on the inclined "ways," (now replaced by a floating dry-dock) where erection units were welded together to form a semi-completed ship, and from where the destroyer would eventually be launched.

Sanders next describes the final stages of the Donald Cook's construction. He describes the time-honored and risky business of "driving the wedges" prior to launching the ship, and captures the excitement of watching this 544-foot long behemoth slide down the ways and into the Kennebec River. The journey continued at sea, during "Charlie" trials, the third, most extensive and most demanding of the shakedown voyages. Finally, on December 4, 1998, the USS Donald Cook was commissioned by the Navy, becoming (at the time) its newest surface warship.

The Yard is a book I have decidedly mixed feelings about, mainly because I worked at Bath Iron Works for four years (1997-2001), eleven months of which were spent aboard the Donald Cook. Because of my personal knowledge, I feel qualified to say that this book has some great strengths and also some notable weaknesses.

One of the greatest positive attributes of The Yard is how effective it is at giving the reader a comprehensive lesson in various stages of shipbuilding without getting bogged down in technological jargon or mind-numbing detail. The technological concepts presented in The Yard are reasonably easy to understand, even for readers who may have never set foot inside a shipyard.

The Yard also presents the human dimension to shipbuilding with great eloquence. It very easily could have become a dry treatise on how good old-fashioned, knuckle-busting manufacturing processes combine with high technology to produce a state-of-the-art warship. It didn't (thankfully), because Sanders had the talent and foresight to make this first and foremost a story about the people who do the sometimes monotonous, frequently dangerous, and always physically arduous work of shipbuilding.

One main weakness of The Yard was caused by Sanders' apparently naïve view of Bath Iron Works, a naïveté that makes his book read in places like a press release from BIW's public relations department. As I understand this author's interpretation, Bath Iron Works at the turn of the 21^st century confronted a variety of problems, some of them serious and none of them insurmountable. The work was dirty and sometimes dangerous, yes; the shipyard faced increased competition from shipyards already using more advanced shipbuilding practices, and therefore required modernization, yes; relations between labor and management were occasionally strained, yes; but, all of these were straightforward challenges that could be overcome quickly and efficiently by BIW's team of dedicated management professionals.

This book's other problematic and (I think) even more fundamental weakness lies in the things that Sanders should have said, but didn't. Two omissions I found to be particularly troublesome.

Nowhere in the book does he describe the indifference that existed then of workers and supervisors to workplace safety and housekeeping, an indifference that often resulted in hazardous, incredibly filthy, and unsanitary working conditions.

The Yard also fails to address the increasingly acrimonious relationship that existed in 1999 between a disillusioned and angry workforce, represented by four unions, and the company's senior management. That long-simmering disillusionment and anger came to a head in the summer of 2000, when the entire workforce walked out on a strike that lasted for four months.

The fact that these issues were not covered in Sanders' book either pays compliment to BIW's effective "handling" of Mr. Sanders during his visits to the shipyard, or gives evidence of the author's intent to avoid discussing controversial issues in his book. Either way, readers end up losing out, because they're denied a more complete understanding of life inside the gates of Bath Iron Works at the dawn of the new millennium.

MY VERDICT: The Yard gets an appreciative tip of my hard hat for being a well written, easy to understand, and very interesting basic primer of shipbuilding. But, it also gets a good sharp kick in the shins with my steel-toed boot for being a book which fails to do complete justice to the 5,000 dedicated professionals who continue to build America's best fighting ships.

POSTSCRIPT: The Yard was published in 1999, and has not been updated by the author in the last 12 years. Since the book was written, Bath Iron Works completed a $30 million refit of its facilities, an upgrade that included a 750-foot "Land Level Transfer Facility" (floating dry dock) and several other major improvements. Its shipbuilding processes have been extensively overhauled, and most of the issues concerning safety and housekeeping have been resolved. Since the general strike of 2000, Bath Iron Works management and its workforce have continued to experience harmonious labor relations.