Resolve Towing and Salvage completed the removal of 11 miles of natural gas pipeline from the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico under the direction of Mr. Todd Duke, Vice President of Operations. Working from shoreline to 11 miles offshore in up to 48′ of water, Resolve crews endured many days of poor weather as cold front after cold front passed across southern Texas and the Gulf of Mexico.

Weather ranged from freezing rain, sleet, lighting, tornados in the area, high winds and seas, dense fog and even an occasional sunny day. Resolve designed and built a custom removal device that was used aboard the derrick barge RMG-400 to pick up the pipe, cut it into 40 foot sections recover any contents in the piping, and load it on to another Resolve barge for storage and transport ashore.

Due to the significant amount of live pipelines in the immediate vicinity of the obsolete line, Resolve had to pinpoint every mooring deployment, thus each relocation of our recovery barge required us to deploy 4 anchors with each anchor being placed on an exact latitude and longitude to avoid fouling of rupturing live pipelines. Additionally since this pipeline had been down for over 30 plus years we had to remove it from under four live pipelines. This was done by finding the pipeline crossings and cutting both ends of the dead pipeline and pulling them out from under the live or hot ones. These live pipelines where passing gas and oil thru them.

Working with Fugro, we were able to safely accomplish this nerve wracking aspect of the operation without incident. The operation also involved running our diver teams around the clock which involved hundreds of dive hours without diver injury. A total of 90 people were employed by Resolve on this project at one time or another including boat crew and maintenance personnel. In addition to various subcontractors, Resolve provided a total of 4 vessels, 2 derrick barges, and one deck barge which were used in support of the project. Once again, Resolve completed its contracted mission safely and without any pollution incidents.