With the clock ticking, Washington is guaranteeing $342 million in loans to a Brazilian firm based in the Netherlands to finish construction on two offshore oil rigs destined for South America. And the big show is playing out right here, on the Portland waterfront.

Story by Lance Tapley.
Photos by John McNeil

I hear on my car radio more news about Peter Cianchette's recent nomination for governor by the Republicans. As I park on Portland's Commercial Street to visit the big new waterfront project of Cianbro, the giant construction company the Cianchette family founded, I see chiseled in stone in front of me, above the entrance to a new brick office building, the words "Evie Cianchette Block." I learn later that Evie was Peter Cianchette's aunt. Her son Eric Cianchette owns the building and the nearby posh Portland Regency Hotel. I feel surrounded by Cianchettes.

At the gatehouse to the Cianbro offices on the Maine State Pier, an impatient older guard is instructing a clueless young woman.

"Ask the man's name," he reminds her.

But they both forget to ask me to sign in. Things are still in the ramping-up stage for this operation.

The Maine State Pier and the adjacent Atlantic Pier were leased by Bath Iron Works to repair ships from 1982 until last fall. Owned by the City of Portland, and recently named the Portland Ocean Terminal, the 16-acre site also contains, on the state pier, a big, blue-sided warehouse with offices on the second floor, which is where I am headed.

Newcomer on the waterfront, Amethyst 4 is visible all the way to back cove

As I wait in a conference room to begin my interviews, with delighted surprise I remember seeing the old ship pictures on the walls from my visits to this building in the late 1960s as the waterfront reporter for the Portland Evening Express. Nostalgically, I recall my many talks here with Ed Langlois, the amiable head of the state government's Maine Port Authority.

Our conversations tended to be about how to keep a working waterfront working. Many years later, it appears an eternal struggle. And government has long had a big hand in the effort. Twenty years ago BIW demanded and got from state taxpayers tens of millions of dollars before it set up shop in Portland Harbor.

Now Cianbro, the working waterfront's latest hope, is leasing this public site to finish the mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, piping, and other work on two half-built, 12,000-ton, 285-foot-high floating oil-drilling rigs – dubbed Amethyst 4 and 5 – that eventually will be towed to the coast of Brazil, where they will bore into the seabed a mile or two beneath the ocean's waves to explore for oil. Amethyst 4, tugged up to Portland from Mississippi, has dominated the eastern waterfront since spring.

Each rig is basically a ship's deck welded on top of four huge, partially submerged pontoons with a derrick in the middle. When drilling for oil, the pontoons' motors constantly reposition the structure, guided by signals from Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites. Each rig will have a crew of about 120.

The company down south that was constructing the rigs went bankrupt. Their owners then chose Cianbro to finish the job, though it had never done this kind of work. The owners are a Brazilian-American collection of corporations called Petrodrill, based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The Amethyst project speaks volumes about the international search for oil. A team of 30 Petrodrill people is overseeing the work in Portland. It includes Canadians, British, Brazilians, Dutch, and Italians.

The endless search for work

Soon I am walking through Cianbro's cubicled offices, which are full of men and some women working at laptops, poring over blueprints, and still unpacking cartons.

Peter Vigue, right, on the job

For most Portlanders, this big project unexpectedly bobbed up from the deep. It was something of a surprise even for Cianbro. The company only knows 10 percent of its business two years ahead. Ensuring Cianbro's future is a special challenge when combined with the inevitable boom-and-recession business cycle, says company president Peter Vigue. He is always hustling for work.

I interview him back in the conference room. As we sit at a vast wooden table, it pours outside. Through the windows, Amethyst 4 looms over us across sheets of rain.

"We have no master plan," he sighs. Manufacturing in Maine is declining, "but our core competency is heavy industry. What are we to do?"

His broad answer, and the answer to the specific question of how he found this job, is to look for work on a continental scale. But rather than send workers to far-flung corners of the continent, Vigue wants to find work in those far-flung corners that he can bring to Maine – like these oil rigs.

This particular job will help quicken Portland's economy through the fall of 2003. By June, Cianbro already employed close to 300 people. The second rig will arrive this summer. By early fall, 800 people should have jobs. Vigue would like to find more such projects, but he's also intensely focused on getting this job done.

Vigue is intensely focused on getting this job done

"We have an extremely tough schedule to meet," observes company spokesperson Dottie Hutchins.

Amethyst not only provides local employment, it also helps the city budget. Cianbro's rent will bring in $1 million a year for 18 months, and the company has an option to extend the lease for another six months. However, the city will subtract up to $650,000 for work Cianbro has to do to bring the warehouse and offices up to current building-code standards.

This upgrading will be useful because, at roughly the same time it embraced this temporary project, the city council approved a long-range plan to turn the two piers into a cruise-ship terminal called Ocean Gateway at a cost of $16.5 million. The Atlantic Pier, where most of the oil-rig work will be done, is to become the new berth of the Scotia Prince ferry to Canada, now tied up at the International Marine Terminal near the bridge to South Portland (built by Cianbro).

Cianbro's proposal stimulated the city to rethink its plan of using the piers just for cruise ships. This fit with the choice of Portland voters in a 1987 referendum to keep a working waterfront with a mix of uses. They were then reacting to rampant condominium development on the wharfs. Jeffrey Monroe, Portland's transportation director, sees no problem mixing the ferry, the growing cruise-ship business (42 expected this year), and continued industrial use of the public piers.

"I wouldn't want to drop cruise-ship passengers off in the middle of an oil terminal, but they are fascinated by a working waterfront," he believes.

The city, however, is selective in what it wants in the working-waterfront mix. Early this year the city council rejected the request of a group of investors to berth an old Soviet submarine [featured this summer in the Harrison Ford movie K-19: The Widowmaker] at one of the public piers. It was to have become a sort of Cold War museum, a tourist attraction. The council was wary because, when the sub was offered as a tourist trap in Florida, its operators went bankrupt. This rejection didn't preclude the sub going to a private wharf, but instead it found a home in Providence.

The Cianbro activity has encountered no significant objections. The Munjoy Hill Neighborhood Association, for example, has applauded. "This site was headed in another direction, but they've welcomed us," Parker Hadlock, a Cianbro manager, says of the city's response.

The project could employ as many as 800

"I spent all of last year away from home," adds Amethyst project chief David Leavitt. "I'm happy to be here."

He's happy to help the waterfront's economy, too: "When I was a little boy I used to go fishing off the wharfs with my friends from Munjoy Hill. We'd run fast through the waterfront." At that time, sections were derelict and spooky.

Leavitt is a Portland native who has 27 years with the company. Hadlock, a Freeport native, has 21 years in. They are typical of Cianbro managers: people with native names like Leavitt, Hadlock, Hutchins, and Vigue who have spent decades with the company. They tend to be graduates of the University of Maine or places like Southern Maine Technical College. Vigue went to Maine Maritime Academy.

Describing her boss's devotion to securing the Amethyst work, Dottie Hutchins says breathlessly in sincere adoration: "Peter Vigue never, ever gave up."

At Cianbro, Vigue is the person who seems most "confident and serene, alert, adventurous, and unwearied," as Thoreau describes the ideal business character – though, at 54, bald, short, slim, bespectacled, he is not awe-inspiring in appearance. And, a nonstop talker, he is given to say corny things like "I'm blessed with some of the finest people there are."

In the Cianbro company book, he reveals "I never once in my entire history with the company refused to do a job, no matter how distasteful the request was or how it impacted my personal life." When I read this, I thought the guy must be nuts (my reaction explains why I'll never run a huge corporation), but after meeting him I can't help liking him, he is so un-arrogantly old shoe, just what a Maine business executive should be – so different from, say, a haughty New York CEO. And I have sympathy for anyone who ultimately carries the burden of keeping thousands of people employed year in and year out. Although he says he is approached nearly every month to sell the company, "we're not for sale." He wants to keep the burden.

"This is his life," Hutchins says. Vigue's son also is a Cianbro executive.

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©2002 Portland Magazine Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher editor@portlandmonthly.com Click here to subscribe