Fernandina Beach: Mill, Port and Marina Lifting

Two mills, one outage calendar

The Smurfit Westrock mill began in 1937 as a Kraft Container Corporation plant between the port and Old Town. Its parent's 2025 annual report lists about 928,000 tons a year of containerboard capacity at Fernandina, and the company says the mill and its box plant employ around 600 people. Recent investments it describes include a reconfigured woodyard, a single high-capacity vacuum washer replacing three batch washers, and an evaporator upgrade.

A few blocks away, Rayonier Advanced Materials makes high-purity cellulose. The plant also opened in 1937 and passed 10 million tons of cellulose production in early 2021.

For a crane crew, a pulp mill is a maze of pipe racks, conveyors and tanks where most picks are blind and many are made inside the plant fence with little room to set up. Planned outages concentrate weeks of work into days: pulling motors and gearboxes, swapping washer and evaporator components, setting new piping spools. Contractors who staff these outages lean on certified operators, qualified riggers and signal persons who can run radios in a noisy plant.

The Port of Fernandina

The port is owned by the Ocean Highway and Port Authority of Nassau County and run by a private operator under contract; that operator has changed hands several times since 2018. Mill products have historically made up much of the export volume, with one 2016 account saying about 40 percent of the containerboard mill's output was exported, much of it through this port.

Breakbulk cargo such as rolls, steel and project pieces is handled differently from containers, with more rigging decisions per lift: spreader bars, choker hitches, sling angles and tag lines. Rigging certifications pay off quickly here.

Salt, wind and the Amelia River

Everything on the island lives in salt air. Wire rope corrodes from the inside out, so a frequent close inspection catches problems a quick glance misses. Sheaves, pins and outrigger cylinders take a beating too. Fall and winter northeasters can bring steady onshore wind for several days, and summer thunderstorms build fast over the marsh west of town.

Marina and dock work along the Amelia River often uses barge-mounted cranes, which falls under OSHA's floating crane rules in 1926.1437. Know how list and trim limits reduce capacity before you are asked to run one.

Hurricane season adds one more layer. The island is low, the port and mills sit right on the water, and any construction crane on site from June through November needs a written hurricane plan under Florida's 2025 hoisting-equipment law.