PROJECT
PROFILES

Marathon GME Project-Temporary Power Project

This project won a 2008 ABC National Eagle Award for Excellence In Construction and an ABC Bayou Chapter Award of Excellence.

One of America's largest refinery expansions, Marathon's Garyville Major Expansion (GME) Project is best described as the construction of an entirely new refinery on several hundred acres of muddy sugarcane fields.  The original Garyville facility was completed in 1976 and was the last grassroots refinery to be built in the United States.  It occupies 3,000 acres on the east bank of the Mississippi River along Highway 61 between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

Fluor Corporation awarded Industrial Specialty Contractors (ISC) a $90 million, lump-sum contract for 65% of the electrical and instrumentation work on the site, as well as full responsibility for temporary power, lighting, communications and computer network infrastructure to support all mobile offices and contractor lunch facilities, 10 new refinery units and various related structures.

Once ground was broken in May, 2007, Marathon Construction Management and Fluor Corporation dramatically expanded ISC's scope of work to include engineering for power and lighting, office data-cable design, and installation of SOOW service cable from distribution racks to distribution panels and welding machines.

ISC's work scope expanded yet again in July, when ISC was asked to assist the site's resource-strapped service and civil contractors.  ISC rose to the challenge, supplying janitorial services, water and ice, trash collection, movement of office furniture, courier services, material procurement, and 60,000 yards of excavation and backfill.

ISC recorded more than 173,610 man-hours of work on the Marathon GME Project, 93% of which was self-performed.  The remaining 7% was awarded to local and regional merit contractors.  Temporary power alone accounted for $9.2 million of the contract value, and out-of-scope assignments added $3 million and 70,000 man-hours to the work anticipated in the contract.

The weather presented yet another challenge in the form of Hurricane Gustav, which decimated Louisiana's electrical infrastructure and left more than a million people without power for up to a month.  ISC anticipated the outages, obtained and staged the generators, and had the construction site up and running on emergency power in just 30 hours.

The Marathon GME project is one of the largest in ISC's history and entailed the broadest scope of work ever completed by the company – far broader than anything anticipated in the contract or the company mission statement.  It was completed without a single recordable safety incident of any kind, a remarkable accomplishment under extraordinary circumstances, in only 18 ½ months.