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January 2011 www.sname.org/sname/mt Wartsila had done it for virtually everybody? Argentina, the Baltic states and so on, all except for the Canadians, I think, and the Americans. ere was no doubt in my mind why they were doing this and we were very glad to have them. ey were very good. Just about everything they predicted would hap- pen, did happen. I would go so far as to say I never would have done the job or agreed to run it without having their input. Someone from Exxon or Standard Oil had gone over there to Finland for the summer and told them this was going on and I got a phone call in about November 1968. (I learned at the end of August/beginning of September that this job was going to go ahead.) e call was from the managing director of Wartsila Helsinki Shipyard, who told me told me they were coming over to meet with us. He brought with him a guy called Bengt Johansenn, one of the naval architects. And we met with these two guys for a couple of days, then drew up a two-page contract. ey would make avail- able all of the technology they thought was needed and it would remain theirs, or some- thing to that e ect. Houston chartered the ship and did our contract with Humble saying we could do anything we wanted to in this icebreak- ing thing as long as when we got nished we return the ship in the condition we had received it. Manhattan arrived in Chester, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, about the middle of January 1969. I started out with a team of six or seven guys and they went down and started to talk to Sun Shipyard about what we were going to do. We got the plans of Manhattan and the design process started. I remember that between Christmas and New Years, we had the rst really big meeting with the whole Humble team and the Esso International team. We had sat down in Esso International and in ve or six weeks we put together every- thing we thought was going to have to be done and how much we thought it would cost to do it, to make the conversion of the ship, how long it would take, and so forth. [The pro- jected cost] came out at $28 million. We figured out what the conversion would look like and that came from, except for the shape of the bow, the structural rein- forcement of the whole ship. We put an ice belt on the ship and we had to strengthen the internals in the ship. We and the Finns decided that the internal structure of the ship, and the bulkheads and so forth, were not strong enough to support what was needed, so we put these great big I-beams, we had to bank them, right across the ship, every fteen feet. e ice belt on the outside was welded onto the side shell of the ship, and it was shaped outward to keep the ice from riding up and outward over the deck. A lot of really big [decisions] hap- pened during this period. I got a call on a Sunday afternoon, probably the rst week in January, from Sun Ship who asked, Do you mind if we cut the ship into pieces?? I thought that was a good idea, because for all the steel work we wanted to do, they didnt have nearly enough capacity, and thats why we had the four other shipyards. KELLY: When the conversion of Manhattan was completed, were you aboard for the two voyages in 1969 and 1970? GRAY: I was onboard for four weeks during the rst voyage. e ship left Sun in early August 1969 and she was ready to go on, but I stayed back to help get [additional design work] started. We had berths for 126 people on the ship. A lot of those were subsequently put in?the ship wasnt made to carry that. We had several media people onboard, and Bill Smith, who wrote a book about this and eventually came and worked for Exxon, was the energy reporter for e New York Times , The forward section of Manhattan is towed from Philadelphia to Newport News, Virginia during conversion in 1969. Another section of the ship was towed to a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama. I got a call on a Sunday afternoon, probably the rst week in January, from Sun Ship who asked, Do you mind if we cut the ship into pieces??