A year ago, about 100 people gathered at a Charleston dock to celebrate the departure of a former Navy destroyer for a city deep in the Amazon rain forest.
     The former USS Hoel, moored at the former Charleston Naval Shipyard, was a symbol that day of the bright prospects for redevelopment of the shipyard, shut down more than a year earlier.
     The Hoel would be the first in a line of decommissioned Navy ships to be converted to electric power-generating stations at the shipyard; each conversion would employ 150 workers.
     The ships, which could generate enough power to light the city of Georgetown, would then be sent to third-world nations to power cities. The owners of the Hoel, Charleston Shipbuilders Inc., had a $30-million contract to supply power to the city of Manaus, Brazil.
     "It's the beginning of a new age of electricity in the Amazon," a Brazilian energy official told the crowd.
     But after the ceremony, the Hoel didn't leave for Manaus. It was towed back to an industrial pier, where it began to list five degrees. It was the first sign of the troubles to come.
     A few weeks later, Jim Boles, an engineer hired to run the Hoel's power plant, watched tugs pull the ship out of Charleston Harbor for the journey to Manaus.
     "It's not ready to go," he thought.
     He was right.
     The Hoel never worked the way it was supposed to.
     Now Charleston Shipbuilders is down from 160 to 27 employees, with no work assured in the future, the company's president said this week.
     And the dreams of creating jobs in Charleston by making warships into power plants are shattered.
    
Manaus, Brazil
     Imagine a port city three times larger than the metropolitan Charleston area. A sprawling city, like Atlanta, with high-rise office, hotel and apartment buildings.
     That is Manaus, a city of 1.5 million people carved out of the rain forest, a city where the chocolate-colored Amazon River and silver-green Negro River run together to form what locals call the Parting of the Waters.
     To attract industry and economic development, the federal government made the city a tax-free zone in 1967. Industry flocked to the city, which grew so rapidly that utilities couldn't keep up with the growing demand for electric power supply.
     Power in whole sections of the city is shut down for hours at a time, leaving city residents without air-conditioning and baking in the 100-degree tropical heat and intense humidity of the rain forest.
     When the power goes out, so do street lights, causing traffic accidents. Tourists return to hotels before scheduled power outages to avoid having to navigate dark staircases by candlelight. Elevators don't work.
     Last year, a baby boy died at a hospital after back-up generators failed.
     Sections of the city scheduled for black-outs, usually in six-hour increments, are avoided.
     People's lives and habits are scheduled around the power out- ages.
     "You can't sleep. You can't work. It's really, really very uncomfortable for a city built like any modern city," said Gilberto Januzzi, a professor of energy studies in Brazil and visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
     Past attempts to fully power the city had been spectacular failures. In the early 1990s, a hastily built hydro-electric dam, which flooded more than 920 square miles of rain forest, turned out to be an environmental catastrophe, Januzzi said.
     Dead fish by the thousands started popping up in the reservoir created by the dam.
     But in October, 1997, the primary electric utility of Manaus, Eletro- norte, announced that the power problems soon would be over.
     A month later, Eletronorte and Charleston Shipbuilders celebrated their deal at the ceremony at the shipyard in Charleston.
    
Charleston's shipyard
     Well before April 1, 1996, the day the Charleston Naval Base and Shipyard closed, the redevelopment of the 1,600 acres of land stretching five miles along the Cooper River was a hugely controversial, at times scandalous, venture.
     With the closing, more than 20,000 people lost their jobs. Many were former shipyard workers who passionately appealed to local leaders to attract shipbuilding companies that would need their skills.
     Some said the days of shipbuilding in Charleston were over, and still others eyed the base as a possible port terminal.
     After a two-year search, the Charleston Naval Complex Redevelopment Authority approved its first major leases for use of the base and shipyard. Charleston Shipbuilders won rights to a 100-acre industrial complex on the waterfront.
     Early in the 1990s, the company headquartered in Florida had bought five former Adams-class destroyers and two former frigates from the Navy soon after they were decommissioned.
     The company planned to strip the ships of their superstructure and use the outmoded steam turbine system that had turned the propeller to turn turbines to generate electricity.
     These steam-powered turbines would generate more than 50 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 150,000 homes.
     After about 18 months, the Hoel was ready. Or so company officials thought. Boles and Allen Fuchs, a ship's supervisor, said they wondered - but it was not their place to question - why the Hoel was being sent to Manaus before its power-generating turbines were tested in Charleston.
    
Hoel arrives
     Last December, the city of Manaus celebrated the arrival of the Hoel, an event promoted by Eletronorte as marking the end to the city's power problems.
     At the time, the utility told reporters that it would be only a matter of days before the power outages ended, Lucia Carla, a reporter for the A Critica newspaper of Manaus, said in a phone interview Friday.
     Weeks passed and nothing happened. The outages continued. Months passed. The city's people became edgy.
     "There were riots in the city because people were very angry with Eletronorte. It gave them false hopes. They did a bad job of raising expectations, saying that this company (Charleston Shipbuilders) would contribute to the solution. But the problems were much bigger," Januzzi said.
     According to Carla, residents protested in city streets, and threw rocks and broke out windows of an Eletronorte office.
     Fuchs and Boles, meanwhile, were deep in the bowels of the Hoel, working furiously to get the power plant running.
     They were among a crew of nearly 40 on the ship, most flown from Charleston to start up the power plant and train a team of Brazilians on how to operate it.
     "I knew that when we got to Brazil our hands were going to be full. They said they expect it to be up in 10 days. I'm going, 'No way,' " Boles said. "It was at that point I knew we were in trouble."
     The ship had begun to rust in the six-week journey at sea, and everything had to be taken apart, cleaned, and put back together again. Spare parts from the Hoel's sister ship, the USS Robison, took two weeks to arrive from Charleston, Fuchs said.
     And when parts got to Brazil, it took as much as a week to get them through customs, he said. Custom workers were on strike several weeks.
     "They had so many problems. We shut down for lube oil pumps. We shut down for steam lines blowing out all the time because they were so old. We shut down for one thing after another," said a foreman, who asked that he not be named.
     In March, ball bearings in the turbines blew out due to a lack of oil pressure. By April, the Hoel was still not producing power.
     The engineers from Charleston worked aboard the ship 12 hours a day, trying desperately to get the ship up. Conditions aboard the Hoel were hellish, Boles said.
     Temperatures outside were 90 to 100 degrees. In a steel ship with little ventilation, with scalding steam lines, pipes and boilers, the temperature reached past 120 degrees, Boles said.
     Several men fainted from heat exhaustion, said the foreman. "Everything is real close. It's like 12 people trying to live in a camper trailer," he said.
     The company pressured the crew to get the work done to meet its contractual obligations while city residents grew increasingly skeptical.
     Portugese-speaking secretaries acted as translators and helped the crew exchange money, get their laundry done, and get around the city. The secretaries warned workers not to say they were from the Hoel. If asked, they were to say they were tourists, Boles said.
     The Hoel was moored at the end of a dock in the Negro River on fenced-in Eletronorte property. As such, the ship was not in public view, but the crew picked up on the rising tempers among city residents as months passed without relief from the power shortages.
     "After about two months, the general feeling about the Hoel was that it was a ghost ship and that they had been lied to," the foreman said of the people of Manaus.
     At the most, the Hoel generated 12 megawatts of the 50 megawatts of electric power for Eletronorte, Boles said. When he and the other crew from Charleston left Manaus after five months, the Hoel was still not operating and the outages continued, he said.
     In an interview two months ago, Les Brumwell, the president of Charleston Shipbuilders, confirmed problems with the Hoel but said Eletronorte and the people of Manaus had been patient.
     Last month he said Charleston Shipbuilders lost its $1.4 million performance bond to Eletronorte.
     After nearly a year in Manaus, the Hoel is still not operating. Its four boilers were undergoing major repairs last week.
     The final blow came two weeks ago. Eletronorte canceled the $30-million contract, Brumwell said last week.
    
Charleston Shipbuilders
     "You know that saying, 'A boat is like a hole in the water that you throw money into?' Well, that's the Hoel," Brumwell said.
     Brumwell said Charleston Shipbuilders bought the Navy ships believing they would be in better condition. The outdated steam equipment on the Hoel, built in 1959, failed repeatedly.
     Because of the company's experience with the Hoel, it does not plan to send its ships in California to Charleston for conversion into power generating stations, he said. "We don't want to run into the same problems as we did with the Hoel."
     For the same reason, Charleston Shipbuilders decided to scrap the Hoel's sister ship, the USS Robison, rather than convert it to a power generating barge. The company has plans to sink the Robison in the ocean to serve as an artificial reef.
     The company's scrapping of the Robison also has landed it in hot water with labor and environmental authorities.
     In July, federal labor regulators fined Charleston Shipbuilders nearly $124,000 for exposing employees to lead dust and fumes while they worked on the Robison.
     In September, the company and its parent, Consolidated Minerals Inc., agreed to pay a $200,000 fine for environmental violations during asbestos removal from the Robison.
     Brumwell said Charleston Shipbuilders has not been able to find other work. Coupled with financial losses with the Hoel and a poor economic climate, the company faces an uncertain future, he said.
     "We do see some changes coming. We're not shutting down, but we do see a downturn. Right now, we are appraising what we're going to do in terms of our lease," with the Charleston Naval Complex Redevelopment Authority, Brumwell said.
     "No decision has been made, but we are most likely going to have to make some changes because business conditions for us have not been very good lately," he said.
     After the overhaul of its boilers, the Hoel could begin producing 25 megawatts of power by the middle of November, Brumwell said. Eletronorte has agreed to discuss a new contract once the Hoel is running, he said.
     "Certainly we had higher expectations, but we don't have anyone to blame but ourselves," Brumwell said. "We embarked on a new venture that we expected to have worked out better."
     Arlie Porter covers Charleston County. Contact him at 937-5548 or at porter@post andcourier.com.