Heavy Metal

The Hard Days and Nights of the Shipyard Workers Who Build America's Supercarriers

Michael Fabey

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780062996251
• eBook ISBN: 9780062996275
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: History

An extraordinary story of American can-do, an inside look at the building of the most dangerous aircraft carrier in the world, the John F. Kennedy.

Tip the Empire State Building onto its side and you’ll have a sense of the length of the United States Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the most powerful in the world: the USS John F. Kennedy. Weighing 100,000 tons, Kennedy features the most futuristic technology ever put to sea, making it the most agile and lethal global weapon of war.

Only one place possesses the brawn, brains and brass to transform naval warfare with such a creation – the Newport News Shipbuilding yard in Virginia and its 30,000 employees and shipyard workers. This is their story, the riggers, fitters, welders, electricians, machinists and other steelworkers who built the next-generation aircraft carrier. 

Heavy Metal puts us on the waterfront and into the lives of these men and women as they battle layoffs, the elements, impossible deadlines, extraordinary pressure, workplace dangers and a pandemic to complete a ship that will be essential to protect America’s way of life.

The city of Newport News owes its very existence to the company that bears its name. The shipyard dominates the town—physically, politically, financially, socially, and culturally. Thanks to the yard, the city grew from a backwater to be the home of the premier naval contractor in the United States.

Heavy Metal captures an indelible moment in the history of a shipyard, a city, and a country.

1

Steel City

WINTER 2011

Interstate 664 tried to race past Newport News, high above the old downtown and its waterfront, but the traffic stalled as the on-ramps dumped cars onto the freeway and the off-ramp congestion jammed up the main transportation thoroughfare. It was from this vantage point that the breadth and scope of Newport News Shipbuilding could be truly appreciated. The shipyard monopolized the southwestern swath of the city limits, claiming the length of the James River banks, clutching the waterway with a series of piers and docks augmented by fort-like warehouses and construction sheds—a slice of the industrial Northeast erected on a Dixie waterfront, cranes’ silhouettes rising from the waterfront like giant metal insects, including the skyscraper-ish, monstrous gantry known as Big Blue to honor its color, size, and power.

In Newport News, the city and the yard were indeed one. Once a seaport hamlet, the waterfront grew into the nation’s naval shipbuilding juggernaut, simply called the yard throughout the southeastern region of Virginia known as Hampton Roads. Tens of thousands of steelworkers plied their trades there for Local 8888.

Cartographers etched the name Newport News on the map more than a century ago, when sailors, dockworkers, and watermen roamed the streets watching bears dance and hunting women and whiskey in garishly painted wooden shacks that served as bordellos and bars—offering beer from vats you could wash a Great Dane in—along a downtown stretch called Hell’s Half Acre and Bloodfield, near the newly built Chesapeake and Ohio rail terminal. On Sundays, evangelicals held religious services on Pier Seven, using rope coils and freight boxes for benches as the three-decked steamer Virginia belched on the river past oystermen and their raffish skipjack boats. Known as Smoky Joe, the steamer carried passengers destined for the Hotel Warwick, named for the county, which was one of Virginia’s eight original shires.

Newport News Shipbuilding grew from the vision of Collis Potter Huntington, the American rail magnate who identified the spot as a terminus for his line after the Civil War. Huntington had first ridden up to the James River a century ago on horseback; while a teenager he had roamed the country as a peddler, selling and trading a variety of goods. The Connecticut Yankee surveyed the harbor of what became Hampton Roads and foresaw the future. Decades later, the peddler–turned–rail magnate gobbled up land where he expected his C&O line to end. At that time, it was mainly farmland marked by the earthworks to protect Confederate forces. Huntington needed a city to support his business plans and immediately set to work on the future layout as coal started shipping in 1882. He chartered his new shipyard—Chesapeake Dry Dock & Construction Company—four years later, the same year Newport News officially became a city. The new city’s first mayor, Walter A. Post, later served as the yard’s president.

Huntington was quite clear about why he wanted to invest so much in his new enterprise: “The roadstead, well known to all maritime circles, is large enough to float the ocean commerce of the world, easily approached in all winds and weather without pilot or tow; it is never troubled by ice and there is enough depth of water to float any ship that sails the seas and at the same time is so sheltered that vessels can lie there in perfect safety at all times of the year.”

Exactly the kind of attributes that about a century later made it a perfect place to build the largest and most complex warship ever put to sea—the American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a one-hundred-thousand-ton sailing “city”—one with an airport for supersonic jets, powered by a pair of nuclear reactors the size of large vans, serving as a navy base with its own hospital, maintenance garages, fire department, and everything else needed for four thousand people to live, work, and make war, at sea, for months on end.

And on an unseasonably warm February day in 2011, with radio reports predicting highs in the 70s, shipbuilders marked an official milestone in building the US Navy’s newest aircraft carrier—CVN 79. The ship would not be done and delivered to the navy for another decade, but given the recent carrier construction problems and the mood of Congress, the navy wanted to make sure there would be a CVN 79 to buy. The sooner the yard started building the new carrier, the better. The ship had no name yet, but today they would cut the first ceremonial steel plate—about the width of a steelworker’s hand, as long as a pickup bed, and as blue as a summer’s sky.

Shipbuilders cut the steel with a plasma burner, just one of the innovative everyday tools at Newport News Shipbuilding. The machine shoots a stream of plasma—the so-called fourth state of matter created by superheating a gas to temperatures greater than 21,000 degrees Fahrenheit—and then adding even greater energy with an electrical current that creates an electrified plasma arc at temperatures reaching about 40,000 degrees, which melts and cuts steel and blows away the molten metal. Equipment like this, in the hands of seasoned shipbuilders who had honed their craft over decades of waterfront work, made it possible to build the US carrier vessel nuclear, or CVN. Today the shipyard would be making the first cut on the seventy-ninth US Navy carrier, and yard shipbuilders knew they needed more modern innovations than plasma cutters to ensure that there would be a CVN 80, a CVN 81, and so on. The preceding carrier, CVN 78, the USS Gerald R. Ford, had proved so difficult, long, and expensive to build because of new designs, unproven technology, and Pentagon midcourse changes that if shipbuilders failed to build CVN 79 more cheaply and efficiently, the yard could be out of the carrier business, and they’d all be out of jobs. The future of the company, the city, and the region depended on building CVN 79 right.

Newport News shipbuilders wanted to prove they could do just that. With a newly configured digital waterfront that computerized almost every metal movement related to CVN 79, workers and managers bet they could build this carrier with fewer people in less time for less money than the previous ship.

CVN 79 was the first carrier completely designed in a computer so as to take advantage of digital engineering and manufacturing. For previous carriers, multiple paperwork packages were developed for each single portion of the ship, used to describe the assembly process but without much detail. The different steelworker trades and shifts had to physically hand off these packages between departments—leading to delays, misinterpretations, and production miscues. Easily accessible and shareable digital work packages changed all that. Thanks to computer modeling, experience with the Ford, and good old shipbuilder savvy, yard procurement managers could figure out not only how many thousands of valves or whatever the waterfront needed in total for the ship, but also how many it needed delivered in any given week.

To kick off negotiations with the navy to buy CVN 79, the yard promised to build it in fewer man-hours than CVN 78 took. A man-hour—essentially each hour each employee works to build a ship—was one of the most basic units of measurements in determining the cost to construct a carrier. Looking to slash CVN 79 costs all around, the navy expected to reduce the material cost of the ship up to 20 percent compared to Ford, to reduce the number of man-hours by up to a quarter, and to reduce the cost of government-furnished systems by up to 10 percent. It eventually took about forty-nine million man-hours to build the Ford, and the yard had committed to build CVN 79 with forty million, a seemingly impossible commitment. The plan had interlinked the fates of both ships—what happened on or with the Ford affected the CVN 79 program at a DNA level—design changes, system failures, and even the amount of work needed to fix CVN 78. To truly appreciate the difficulty of constructing CVN 79 and bringing it to life, one must account for Ford and its construction issues as well as its operational successes and miscues.

Despite all that rode on that first slab of steel going through the plasma cutter that February day, it was just one of the tens of thousands of steel plates stacked as high as houses throughout the yard fields, the concrete and asphalt storage areas served by yellow crane bars with magnet legs hanging below them, and in the fabrication shops, where steelworkers lined up metal sheets as big as billboards to be aligned by lasers and cut by robots the size of small sheds. For the finer work—the kind robots could never get quite right—steelworkers bent over plates, balancing their butts on buckets, spring-green hoods pulled over their heads, tools in hands, orange-and-yellow sparks flying over blue coveralls and steel-tipped brown or black boots, their sizzling metalwork mixing with the din of the whirring compressors, clanging metal, and other machinery. The shop air tasted like burnt toast. Smears of light filtered in from windows and electric illumination above, reflecting from the yellow crane bars moving overhead along blue rails the length of the cavernous shop. A white banner hung in the background with blue lettering: MADE IN THE U.S.A.

The metal for the first CVN 79 steel cut in February 2011 had been in the yard for a while. The navy had started to order the carrier’s steel and nuclear-power-plant parts from around the country about four years before the cutting began, with veins of railroad tracks and arteries of roads packed with shimmering sheets of steel from the mountain bowels of Pennsylvania and Indiana feeding in and out of the massive shipyard. At the same time, a small flotilla of steel-laden barges had made its way from the intercoastal through the Chesapeake Bay and to the James River yard depots. Altogether, a half-billion dollars’ worth of special steel, forty-seven thousand tons of it of different widths and strengths, had arrived in the yard—mainly by truck, pancaked rectangular slabs up to four inches thick, to eventually be cut, molded, and assembled by waterfront women and men into an aircraft carrier.

The warship-city was itself being built by a city within a city. Newport News Shipbuilding lorded over its own little sovereign industrial hamlet of more than twenty thousand steelworkers of as many races, religions, and other diverse markers as one would find in any US city of that size, a city whose population could rise as high as thirty thousand and dip down to seventeen thousand, depending on US Navy contracts.

Many of those shipbuilders commuted well over an hour each day each way, including those driving down Route 17—known as it sliced north through Virginia as Tidewater Trail—alongside some of the very trucks stacked high with carrier steel, through the old established English-sounding counties like Middlesex, Gloucester, and York and the rest of the Virginia Middle Peninsula, where bald eagles often soared overhead and deer breakfasted near the side of the road in the predawn light with silhouettes of tractors, farm barns, and far-off tree ridges etching a relief on the shadows of the horizon. Even this late in February, as the yard prepared that metal slab for the first CVN 79 cut, some single-farm spreads sported Christmas lights and other decorations. The lights still twinkled as shipbuilders drove south toward Newport News, alongside well-worked pickups full of crab traps and tired watermen.

Most tuned in one of the many country or gospel stations in this Bible Belt loop of Tidewater. Some listened to sports-talk radio about the Nationals’ chances, or the lack of them. For those who cared, the morning news was not good. Libya remained a mess, following the UN Security Council sanctions on Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi. Congress still fumed over President Obama’s almost $4 trillion budget proposal; Republican lawmakers wanted major cuts—not good news for a yard that built the country’s biggest and most expensive warships.

Ed Elliott III, known in the yard as Little Ed—but more commonly called Wingnut, because his ears stuck out like a couple of open car doors—liked to listen to all kinds of music, but particularly recorded live classic rock from the eighties, like the Eagles Live CD from 1980. On the day they prepared to cut the first CVN 79 steel, as on other days, he made the morning trek from Gloucester County in his 2004 Pontiac Sunfire. Little Ed now worked as a foreman for CVN 78 USS Gerald R. Ford. His father—Big Ed—worked as lead general foreman for Ford and had been a full-time shipbuilder since 1981. While Little Ed most certainly inherited his love for shipbuilding from his dad, as for Wingnut’s ears, the elder Elliott would tell folks, “He got those from his mother.” Many times, when Little Ed arrived at work, he’d find handfuls of wingnuts left anonymously on or in his desk.

Both father and son resembled pioneers from a faded black-and-white photograph, rigged for hard work by sturdy frames, square shoulders, and that certain way many Gloucester farmers and watermen had of carrying themselves, with no spare movements, no unnecessary lists. Big Ed sported a robust mustache, and Little Ed had sprouted a full but neat beard. Little Ed was a born wrench turner who now oversaw, built, and troubleshot piping for Ford carrier systems. Every time he walked through the yard gates, his eyes still sparkled with that sense of awe and pride he had felt that very first time.

“Why don’t you try the Apprentice School instead of going somewhere to college?” Big Ed asked his boy as the lad prepared to finish high school. The yard had established its apprentice system in 1911 and by World War II had become the only institution of its kind with a junior college rating.

For Little Ed, the yard had been like a home away from home. He spent his younger years climbing half-built carriers—blown away by their size—and then attended their christenings. He never forgot the drive-through tour of the yard in a small company van, thinking, I didn’t know it was this big! At the Apprentice School, they showed him everything—new carrier construction, carrier overhauls, the works.

Big Ed started in the yard as a welder and quit after two weeks. He came back in 1981 as an outside machinist and also attended the Apprentice School, graduating in 1985. He became an acting foreman as a third-class mechanic before being promoted to foreman—all the while making those daily long commutes with plenty of other shipbuilders. Sometimes they’d try to throw packages of Twinkies into each other’s truck as they were going over the York River on the George P. Coleman Memorial Bridge.

Some yard commuters would drive through Gloucester to Mathews County. If you wanted to get to Newport News from Mathews, you had to go through Gloucester—there were few straight-line passages in Tidewater. The various bays, rivers, and other coastal features presented natural obstacles to most straight-line commutes. Roads often just dead-ended into some body or ribbon of water, one of the reasons that Newport News ran long and narrow along the James, in a shape like an aircraft carrier. Adjacent to Gloucester, Mathews remained even more isolated by the waterways and governed by the tidal ways. A “come-here”—anyone not born in Hampton Roads—stood out even more in Mathews.

Born in Mathews more than a half century ago, Lee Murphy never imagined living in any other place, nor working anywhere other than in the shipyard. By the time the yard was set to cut steel for CVN 79 that February, Murphy had worked his way up to superintendent for CVN 78 steel work.

Murphy chose to be a shipbuilder at age eighteen in 1976, a month after graduating high school, starting in the X-11 trade—the steel side of the house, as yard workers called it. He followed in the footsteps of his older brother, who then worked as an O-43 millwright.

Lee’s focused now on erecting the individual units, the steel building blocks, that the waterfront arranged and combined and welded to create an aircraft carrier. As he’d explain it to outsiders, he did “all the erecting.” He came just as the yard was expanding, building up the new North Yard—the womb of future aircraft carriers.

While more than an hour away from his small Mathews hamlet, the yard loomed large for Lee, as it did for many in the county or even farther away because of the pay, work availability, and at least some kind of job security. He possessed a wiry, flexible body typical of many longtime yard steelworkers. He squeezed into any space—a desirable trait for his metalworks trade—and he lasted in those cramped conditions for hours. He used his head as much as any college grad to work out the intricate geometry of the pieces in his units. He rose to be a foreman in 1983. The job provided what he valued above anything—the ability to raise a family in a good home.

His son Jason, though, harbored no long-term ambitions as a youngster to follow the family’s shipyard legacy, despite Lee’s attempts to make the waterfront part of family life. When Jason got a toy aircraft carrier as a toddler one Christmas, Lee stood over the ship like a huge human crane, hanging down his arms to cradle his ships in his claw-mimicking hands, bellowing out loud siren noises—WEEEERH! WEEERH!—sounding like the yard’s giant crane during a carrier lift. When father and son later were building a treehouse in their family oak—a tree so big that it took six full-grown adults holding hands to encircle it—they did so in a modular fashion, that is by assembling certain sections first and then mating them together, the same way Lee had erected his carrier steel units.

Jason worked summer breaks in the yard, but when he graduated from Christopher Newport University, just down Warwick Boulevard from the yard’s gates, he became a schoolteacher in Gloucester, following in his mother’s wake instead. He was a Mathews man, though, and the ways of the water have a way of calling those men back. He enrolled a few yea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue
• 1: Steel City
• 2: Outclassed
• 3: Steel Vets
• 4: Labor Gains
• 5: Metal Data
• 6: Setting Precedents
• 7: Trade Wars
• 8: Weapons Await
• 9: Trump Card
• 10: The Flood Cometh
• 11: Blame Game
• 12: Caroline, Again
• 13: On Course
• 14: Covid Carrier
• 15: A Matter of Culture
• 16: Ship Shape
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations Glossary
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher