Shipyards struggle to rebuild work force

PASCAGOULA, Miss. – Donald Ashford can’t go home, but he can still go to work.

Hurricane Katrina saw to that when it forced his family from their Moss Point, Miss., house 10 days ago.

“I’m bringing home the bacon, but I got nowhere to bring it to,” said the 30-year worker for Northrop Grumman Corp.’s shipyard.

He’s part of the state’s largest work force, a man whose only sense of place for now is a shipyard undergoing a massive restoration and cleanup from debris strewn across the port.

A feeling of urgency grows each day as crews fill trash bins and dump trucks with items ranging from shards of metal to a pile of computers. For now about one-fourth of the 12,000-person work force is back – though the count is growing incrementally – scooping and shoveling.

Each trash pile removed signifies one step closer to a return to shipbuilding – which the company hopes to resume next week.

Northrop Grumman employees who have not returned or been called back will get paid through the period ending Friday.

But many still can’t be found or reached, and the company heightened its efforts by establishing a hot line for employees to check in.

Since then, the company has received about 2,000 calls, but still needs to hear word from another “few thousand,” said company spokesman Brian Cullin.

Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman has three Gulf Coast yards – in Pascagoula, Gulfport, Miss., and New Orleans – that build ships or sections assembled elsewhere.

They sit within about 110 miles of one another, the largest being Pascagoula’s 800-acre facility.

Including an onshore facility, the defense contractor employs close to 19,000 people in the Gulf region, which accounts for nearly 10 percent of its annual business.

The regional impact is significant. Northrop Grumman’s average operations payroll in the gulf is about $17 million a week, Cullin said.

Pascagoula has the highest profile among the three shipyards. Here, the company builds four classes of vessels for the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard. It competes with Maine’s Bath Iron Works for defense contracts for Navy destroyers.

Nearly every worker who reported to the shipyard was put on cleanup duty. Jackie Robinson didn’t want to drive the Caterpillar front-end loader, but he understood that he had no choice.

It’s a job few thought they would ever be doing until Katrina struck the Gulf Coast last week, even those who encountered Hurricane Camille’s wrath in 1969.

“I’ve been here since 1968 and Camille wasn’t this bad,” Robinson said. “I’m telling you this place was tore up – tore up, I tell you.”

On Tuesday, Chief Executive Officer Ron Sugar visited the shipyard. After he left, word soon spread among the workers that they could be resuming their shipbuilding work by next week.

The company plans to phase in production while continuing its restoration and cleanup, said Philip Teel, the company’s ships system president.