Vancouver Drydock

Water Lot Project

Shipyards have been a part of our neighbourhood for over a century – building, repairing and maintaining the many vessels that ply our West Coast waters.

At Seaspan’s Vancouver Drydock, we take great pride in being a link from North Vancouver’s rich maritime history to the diverse and vibrant Shipyards District waterfront community we have today – and we look forward to continuing that tradition for many years to come. As a company, our goal is to build a multi-generational business that will create sustained jobs and economic activity in our local community for decades to come. To enable this, we are consolidating our repair and maintenance services at Vancouver Drydock and focusing our shipbuilding activities at our Pemberton site.

At Vancouver Drydock, this means making improvements to better use our land and the space within our water lots. We have applied to the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority to extend our water lot and add two new smaller floating drydocks and a work pontoon to our existing drydock operations.

In 2021, as part of the port authority’s Project & Environmental Review (PER) process, Seaspan undertook a number of activities to both notify the community about the proposed project and to solicit feedback. Based on the input received in the summer of 2021, Seaspan identified a number of proposed mitigations to address community feedback and from July 27, 2022 through to September 14, 2022 requested further input on the proposed mitigations. Thank you to everyone who took the time to share their perspectives. Summaries of these activities, as well as other information is available under Learn More or on the port authority’s website.

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WATER LOT PROJECT

The proposed water lot project has two main parts.

Part One

Part one would see us shift the position of the existing Careen floating drydock approximately 40 metres south away from the shoreline, and installing two smaller floating drydocks and work pontoon on the west side of our operations, adjacent to the Careen. The floating drydocks and work pontoon would be secured to six permanent support pilings to keep them in place. The new mid-sized drydock would be equipped with up to four cranes mounted on the sidewalls of the drydock to transfer equipment from our main service pier to the work areas.

Part Two

Part two would include extending our water lot west by approximately 40 metres to accommodate the smaller of the two new drydocks and a portion of the work pontoon. This is consistent with our existing lease agreement with the port authority. The project will add a further 100 new jobs to the 200 people we have at our operations today.

To find out more about our proposed project, go to Learn More or take a look at our Project Information Guide.