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The Maritime Government
Naval architect and ATB pioneer Bob Hill has handed away on the age of 67. Hill performed a major function within the growth of articulated tug/barge design, and he helped shepherd by the U.S. Coast Guard’s choice to deal with the purpose-built ATB tug as a tugboat for regulatory functions. This opened the door for price financial savings, and Hill described it because the “single most essential and influential occasion within the continued growth and deployment of the AT/B in America.”
Hill was born in Troy, New York in 1952. As a naval architect, he joined the agency of John W. Gilbert Associates in 1974 and stayed for the primary 20 years of his profession. In 1994, he got down to discovered Ocean Tug & Barge Engineering in Milford, Massachusetts. His agency grew to become the chief in American ATB design, and it has labored on the vast majority of ATB models in service in the USA right this moment. For Hill’s lifetime of service to the trade, he was named a distinguished fellow of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers (SNAME) in 2015.
Hill believed {that a} well-designed ATB might do something a ship can do, and at decrease price. Relative to a ship of the identical deadweight, an AT/B has a smaller mandated crew dimension, decreased price of development, lighter draft, and decrease port charges. Upkeep prices are decrease due to decreased equipment necessities, and smaller shipyards can be utilized for drydocking the tug and the barge.
Over the course of his profession, Hill labored with the entire commercially-available ATB barge coupling methods and the main ATB operators. He designed a few of the most iconic models in the ATB commerce, just like the OSG “Costwise” sequence, a set of three HFO-fueled, 12,000 horsepower ATB tug/barge combos constructed particularly for lightering on the Delaware River. They have been the biggest in America on the time of development. In 2017, his agency helped design what might be the world’s largest ATB models, if constructed: a sequence of 750-foot-long compressed pure fuel carriers for SeaOne Caribbean.
The Costwise-class OSG Imaginative and prescient within the notch (OSG)
