Company successfully adds new accommodation to ship, despite disruption from Hurricane Irma
By
Rebecca Gibson |
Almaco has delivered 32 new cabins and four suites with adjacent corridors, elevator lobbies and stairs onboard Carnival Cruise Line’s Carnival Elation, despite major disruption from Hurricane Irma, which hit the Caribbean in September.
Prior to starting the dry dock project at Grand Bahama Shipyard in Freeport, Bahamas, Almaco’s modernisation team prefabricated the stateroom block – including the 32 cabins, four suites and other areas – at a mobile cabin factory near its warehouse. A few days after the team started dry dock work, the Category 5 Hurricane Irma hit the Bahamas, bringing winds of up to 185 miles per hour and forcing the project to stop.
“For the first time in Almaco’s history, a project that initially involved building, lifting and installing modular cabins onboard a ship, now required for the same modular cabins to be offloaded from the vessel,” said Hervé Touzard, Almaco’s vice president of Marine After Sales. “This was obviously not part of the original plan! Almaco’s project management team had to adapt to this new situation, successfully removing the cabins from the Carnival Elation, and securing them back at the Mobile Cabin Factory.”
Almaco worked with Carnival and other contractors to secure all loose materials and prepare the vessel for a seven-day journey to dock at a safe berth away from Irma’s path. Once the ship was back in dry dock, Almaco spent seven days fitting the cabins and completed additional work during the first couple of cruises.
“Almaco rose to the most unpredictable challenges and thanks to our team’s flexibility to adapt to schedule changes, clear and constant communication and coordination with Carnival, Grand Bahama Shipyard and other contractors, and efficient optimisation of the slots we had available to work at any given time, we were able to successfully deliver the project,” the company said in a statement.