Last January, days after US Airways Flight 1549 made a miraculous emergency landing in New York’s Hudson River without losing a single life, employees at one of Saint Paul’s oldest companies watched with interest as a giant crane attempted to lift the plane out of the river.
Would the crane be able to lift an 80-ton airliner filled with water? The delicacy of the operation interested staffers at National Oilwell Varco (NOV)’s offices in the Saint Paul Port Authority’s Riverview Business Center. But the ability of the crane to lift the airplane was never in question – not to these people.
Their company had designed the crane being used, the Weeks 533, a floating heavy-lift crane capable of hoisting 500 tons and revolving after doing it.
And, in fact, as cranes go, the Weeks 533 is not one of the bigger ones for the firm that traces its origins in Saint Paul back to building equipment for the timber industry in the 19th Century. The company’s Saint Paul operation has designed the largest crane in the world, capable of lifting 7,400 tons, or 14.8 million pounds. And in 1991, two of the 6,000-ton cranes it designed set the Guinness World Record for the largest single lift: 10,750 tons (21.5 million pounds).
The company’s buildings on Plato Boulevard are quiet places. Most of the 180 employees work in small offices or in warrens of cubicles where signs request visitors to keep the noise down. The corridors are lined with award plaques for engineering achievements and framed photographs of engineering behemoths.
While giving a tour, Cathy Leritz, the company’s Director of Human Resources, Quality Management and Risk, paused in front of a photograph of two cranes next to an off-shore oil-drilling platform.
“These are twin 6,600-ton cranes lifting a six-story building – living quarters – on to a stationary platform in the North Sea,” Leritz explained. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but the cranes are on a floating vessel next to the platform.”
Designing “super marine cranes” for offshore construction is one specialty of the Saint Paul operation. The visitor pointed to small objects in the photo that looked like several ants standing on their hind legs. “Those are people,” Leritz said.
It’s not surprising that few people are familiar with National Oilwell Varco, which is a name that has evolved from a convoluted series of mergers and acquisitions during the past decade. Probably the most familiar name of the Saint Paul company is American Hoist and Derrick – or Amhoist – which was its name from 1892 through the days when it had foundry and fabrication operations that stretched along the Mississippi River from the Wabasha Street Bridge to Highway 52. Amhoist equipment was used to build the Panama Canal and Mount Rushmore.
“We keep evolving, but now we’re really an engineering and project-management company,” Leritz said. “Virtually everything we design is a prototype. We design it and we have a whole group of project managers who oversee the project from beginning to end by subcontracting all over the world. The boom might be made in Korea, the upper works in China. At any one time, we can be dealing with people from Norway to Singapore.”
Not everything they design winds up in deep water. At the Target Center in Minneapolis, for example, NOV’s Saint Paul engineers designed a concrete arena floor that can be raised or lowered on nearly 100 separate jacks.
National Oilwell Varco, which took its current name after a merger in 2005, has its headquarters in Huston, TX, and has 35,000 employees in 49 countries. But while the company and its products are huge, longtime employees characterize the Saint Paul operation, Leritz said.
“We have plenty of people who are 35-year-plus veterans,” Leritz noted. “We have a very low turnover. The people here are really the company in terms of technical knowhow.”
But why have an engineering operation that designs equipment for deepwater oil drilling located in the Midwest?
“Nobody wants to leave Saint Paul,” Leritz explained. “Occasionally there’s talk of moving us, but it’s never been seriously considered. Besides, we’re also equal distance from all the coastlines, and because we have an airline hub, you can hop a flight to Amsterdam or the Orient.
“We don’t have a walk-in customer base because all of our business is through the industry – and those people know us and our reputation,” Leritz added. “We’re also not manufacturing here, so it doesn’t matter where we are. We have a long history in Saint Paul, but technology and people with knowhow have kept us here.”
