The Fennica wasn’t a stranger to Portland when it arrived July 25 with a 3-foot gash in its hull.
The ship—with a gym, sauna, saloon and room for a 26-member crew—came to Portland twice before to undergo repairs at Vigor Industrial’s Swan Island shipyard.
Ships like the Fennica work in the harshest conditions on the planet, are built to perform the most lunch-bucket of duties, and thus are often in need of work.
The designation of the Fennica as an “icebreaker” is actually a nautical class: It means the boat has “no limitations for repeated ramming.” It is, in the literal sense, a reamer.
Vigor is a $400-million-a-year shipbuilding and repair company based in Portland that occupies a shipyard that opened in 1941 to supply Allied troops during World War II. More than 70 years later, it continues to play a big but often unnoticed role in Portland’s economy, providing family-wage jobs and benefits to 1,000 employees at Swan Island, plus an additional 1,600 elsewhere.
Vigor offered the Fennica the closest available dry dock, a sort of hydraulic lift used to work on boats larger than a football field. The repair itself was relatively straightforward, akin to patching a hole in your jeans. In this case, though, the patch was a 1-ton sheet of steel.
Portlander Frank Foti, CEO of Vigor, managed to stay out of the media fray. While he gets a good amount of business from defense and resource-extraction industries, he is also a healthy contributor to Democratic politicians, including Hales.
Contacted by WW, Foti says he agrees with Greenpeace that the U.S. needs more alternative fuels.
“It would be a shame if, as we do that, we close the door to being able to do work on conventional energy,” Foti says. “It’s still how most of us get around.”
The Fennica had tore its hull en route to the Chukchi Sea, an icebound sea off the coast of Alaska, where it was carrying drilling equipment for Shell Oil Company.
Arctic drilling has been contentious for decades. The infamous Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 consisted of crude from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: The incident became a national symbol of environmental ruin.
But melting ice has recently revealed oil fields off Alaska’s northwest coast, areas once thought impossible to reach. And no company has been more aggressive in drilling in this remote part of the world than Shell.
President Barack Obama gave Shell permits to drill there in 2012. It was a disaster. A rig, called Kulluk, crashed into the coast during a winter storm.
Shell again received permission this spring from the Obama administration to drill six more wells, as long as it used an important piece of equipment: a capping stack, used to stop oil flowing from a blown well.
That stack was on board the Fennica.
When Shell sets out to drill oil, Greenpeace activists are often close behind.
The international organization is known for its highly visible, nonviolent and sometimes illegal tactics, with targets like nuclear weapons, global warming and general ecological scarring. Rainbow warriors, as they are sometimes called, have broken into government buildings, strung banners from the sides of ships—and hung themselves from bridges. In 2011, eight people were suspended from Chicago’s Pulaski Bridge to stop a coal barge from passing.
But Greenpeace has a particular passion for battling Shell’s Arctic oil endeavors. In April, activists actually boarded a ship, Blue Marlin, while it was sailing from Malaysia to Seattle. Shell went to federal court: Greenpeace was ordered to stay at least 300 feet away from its boats.
In June, Greenpeace joined a flotilla of “kayaktivists” in Seattle who shook their oars at Shell’s oil rig, the Polar Pioneer. The kayakers, led by Seattle activist group Backbone Campaign, tried to block its exit from the Port of Seattle on June 15. They lasted two hours.
Jessica Moskovitz, communications director for the Oregon Environmental Council, says many environmental groups want to thwart drilling in the Arctic, but Greenpeace has the training and audacity to make people take notice.
“I’m sure our theory of change is much more incremental and collaborative, but you need galvanizing moments, too,” Moskovitz says. “You need moments that focus everybody’s attention, and that’s what Greenpeace does.”