CONSTRUCTION
™
2005
The Industry’s Newspaper
Reprint
www.constructionnews.net
P.O. Box 791290 San Antonio TX 78279 E11931 Warfield San Antonio TX 78216 E (210) 308-5800 EJan 2005 E Vol. 8 No. 1
Saving the Titanic
S
urmac Inc., based in San Marcos, is
an unusual operation. “We are a real
interesting company,” chuckles
owner Rick Watson. “We’re not your normal deal.”
On its face, Surmac is a specialty contracting company that performs a variety
of industrial, commercial and historic
building repairs and renovations all over
the country.
In San Antonio, some of the company’s projects include redoing the Pyramid Building at Interstate 410 and San
Pedro Avenue and the Tower-Life and Milam buildings downtown.
But then there’s those little extra
jobs – like working on a Saturn 5 rocket,
or a hunk of the Titanic.
“I got a call one day to meet Joe
Sembrat of the Washington, D.C. company, Conservation Solutions, out at National Aeronautics and Space Administration,” Watson recalled. “He had a problem
they wanted us to look at. It turns out it
was a 425-foot Saturn rocket that was in
extremely bad shape.”
The rocket, now inoperable, has
been on display for the past 30 years at
the Johnson Space Center near Houston.
After consulting with corrosion expert Lydia Frenzel of San Marcos, and
specialty materials supplier Skip Wayland of Seguin, Watson and Sembrat developed a plan for restoring the rocket.
“We are going to be rehabilitating
this rocket starting after the first of the
year. It will be chemically stripped of all
its coatings,” Watson explained. “After
that, it will have multi-stage corrosion
treatments applied to it. We’ll then do a
two-coat process on the surface. It is
mostly aluminum and titanium, but there
is really a hodgepodge of all metals in it.
“It was designed to be shot into
space, not laying on its side for 30 years in
a static display. It has a tremendous
amount of corrosion on it and we’re going to have to fabricate new parts and
repair some of the other parts that are
too difficult or costly to fabricate. It
doesn’t work, but it still has its rocket motors, which are pretty impressive.”
Surmac has a Houston warehouse
where it does some of its operations,
Watson said. And in that warehouse is
the rest of the NASA project.
“That’s where I have the Apollo space
capsule and the escape rocket that fits on
top of it,” he said. “All the electronics
were stripped out of it, all the computer
equipment they had, which was pretty
antiquated anyway.
“We’re rehabilitating the capsule as
well. It was originally coated with a
sprayed foam and urethane to insulate it,
because I believe that was the part that
carried the lunar rover and lander. What
has happened over the years is the ure-
Sunlight streams through the Titanic’s portholes as the cleaning process continues.
The metal piece is from the Titanic’s starboard section.
thane and the foam on it has split.”
The Apollo capsule belongs to the
Smithsonian Institute, Watson explained,
and experts there wanted it repaired –
but they wanted the original material
and fabric left intact.
“We found a way, with a special cloth
that we have, to repair the cracks in such
a way that you can’t see them, but yet all
the original material is there,” he said.
“The Smithsonian has already looked at
those repairs and approved them. That
was a big deal.”
The NASA connection coincidently
led to Surmac’s contract to work on a
piece of the Titanic.
“At the same time, Joe Sembrat said
he had a piece of antiquity that he want-
ed to store in my warehouse,” Watson
said. Lease negotiations were completed
and an agreement was signed.
“They showed up with a tractor-trailer and there’s a piece of metal inside of it,
about 30 or more feet long by 12 feet
high,” he recalled. “They uncrated it and,
low and behold, it is largest piece of the
Titanic ever brought to the surface.“
The RMS Titanic, the largest ship in
the world at the time and described as
“practically unsinkable,” struck an iceberg on April 15, 1912, and split in two.
Some 1,523 people died, including the
ship’s designer, the co-owner of Macy’s
Department Store and millionaire John
Jacob Astor IV. Some 705 were rescued.
The 38,000-pound artifact, owned
by RMS Titanic Inc. of Florida, has been
on exhibit all over the world. The curved
metal hunk is a portion of the famous
ship’s first-class section on the starboard
side and has three portholes, two of them
still with their brass fittings and some
partial glass in them.
“We are also experts in ultra-high
pressure water jetting for certain applications and removal of surfaces,” Watson
said. “We did a plan and submitted a bid
to Conservation Solutions.
“We won the contract and, with Sembrat, assisted in the restoration of the Titanic piece,” he said.
“We cleaned it with four different
pressure variations, with Marvin Boatman of Boatman Industries supplying
the high-pressure pumps. We treated it
with three different corrosion treatments
to bring the salt out of it, and put a tannic
acid as the finish coat to help spring more
salt, and then put a paraffin wax over the
top of it as the final preservative.
“We’ve had it in a dehumidification
chamber for five months, sucking all the
excess moisture out of it. And before the
end of the year, it will be crated. After
that, we will store it for another year.
They are thinking about putting it on
permanent display at the Maritime Museum in Virginia.”
Surmac is a hard company to classify.
Originally created as a water jetting and
coating firm, it quickly branched out. “It
really developed from there into concrete
and specialty work, basically as a way to
keep work coming in when things would
slow down. One thing led to another,
and now we’re pretty well known in certain circles.”
Watson’s historic restorations include
the old U.S. Mint in New Orleans, the Rose
Window at San Antonio’s San Jose Mission, numerous old courthouses, including Bexar County’s, the Steves Homestead and the Spanish Governor’s House
in San Antonio.
The company does maintenance on
ships at sea, has coated tunnels and 30below-zero blast freezers and, within the
last few years, developed a roofing system from foam and super, state-of-theart thermoplastic coating. A recent job
was covering the roof of the Waco hanger
where Air Force One is stored when
George W. Bush goes to his Crawford
ranch.
What’s next for the company? “We’re
opening a San Antonio office and warehouse,” Watson said, “where our sales
manager, Art Dresch, will be based.
“We specialize in fast turnarounds in
critical situations,” he explained. “And
we’re always on the lookout for challenging, interesting jobs.”