Steel Flat Bar

On New York's Low Seas: Day 2

If the Statue of Liberty ferry passed right by Lady Liberty and took a five-minute detour farther to the west, the tourists – and even most seen-it-all New Yorkers – would get an eye-opening take on glamorous New York Harbor’s gritty, hard-working side.

This would include the Kill Van Kull, the waterway that runs between the north shore of Staten Island and the southern tip of Bayonne, N.J., as well as Newark Bay, around the corner from New York Harbor.

Shielded from the harbor by Bayonne and Staten Island, these are gritty, industrial waterways, with very few sightseers or pleasure boaters.

A stretch of the Kill Van Kull is a veritable tugboat repair shop. Huge tugs rest on mammoth flotation platforms that hoist them out of the water for workers to access. Many active tugs are docked here too, and their captains pace the decks holding two-way radios, waiting for the next assignment.

On Tuesday, near the tugs, a crew of welders repaired a 100-foot-long steel barge. The workers wore protective hoods and masks and climbed the beams like a high-wire troupe. They used arc welders and torches to put a new hull and sides onto the damaged barge, fastening steel plates up to two inches thick onto its steel-beam frame.

“Then a huge crane comes and lifts it into the water,” said a supervisor, Ramon Acosta, 58.

Under the Bayonne Bridge, a turn leads into Newark Bay, where the vessels are of a massive scale that rivals even the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan. The tankers, which hail from far-flung countries, are piled high with metal storage containers the size of tractor-trailers.

They are escorted by teams of tugs to unloading stations, where huge structures with outstretched arms pick off the metal containers. This is done by an operator in a glass-bottomed gondola that extends out over the deck. Like in an arcade game, the operator lowers a set of claws that carries the containers onto short stacks onshore.

The channels in this area are upward of 40 feet deep, but they constantly grow more shallow over time, necessitating dredging. On Tuesday, several cranes worked away, plunging scoopers into the water and lifting tons of silt into containers on barges. The crane operators worked from images of the bottom taken by survey boats. A drill-rig pounded away nearby, to loosen the rocky bottom, said Nick Ripley, 28, an engineer on the Jay Michael, a tugboat that supports a crane dredging around the clock.

Jaway Metal Co., Ltd, China: stainless steel wire, round bar ...

Jaway Metal Co., Ltd is the enterprise that deals in metal manufacture and exportation. Our factory is located in Xinghua City, Jiangsu Province, one of the largest national production bases of metal materials, and our office is now situated in Shanghai. Our company now owns a land area of 18000 square meters, capital asserts of 50 million RMB, 160 employees and 19 technicists with our own R&D department. We specialize in producing various kinds of metal materials like stainless steel wire, round bar, straight bar, angle bar, flat bar, channel bar, pipe, plate, coil, stainless iron and many other kinds of metal materials in GB, ASTM, JIS, EN, TOCT, KSD, and IS. We welcome OEM and OCM to our company to order non-standard products like high-carbon steel, refractory steel, alloy steel and punched products produced by our own smelting and forging equipment. Along with the development, we now have cooperation with many enterprises to set up long-term and reciprocal business relationship. Our annual production capacity is now over 15000 T, most of which are widely used in petrochemical, textile, ship-making, construction industry and precision instrument manufacture. Our products are certified by ISO9001:2000 authentication quality systems and we are nominated as the AAA enterprise by Jiangsu government.

The Engineer

Congressional edition

Iron age

Chemical engineering

Metallurgical & chemical engineering