Plant Afloat

Employes at Newport News (Va.) Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co. were last week rushing work on a unique job for Central Maine Power Co. Out of the hull of the U. S. Shipping Board's old cargo vessel Jacona (7,000 tons) they were ripping marine engines, boilers, propeller shafts and replacing them with great General Electric turbogenerators and Westinghouse condensers. When their work of renovating the Jacona was done, they would turn over to Central Maine Power Co. not a new-fangled freighter but a floating power plant with which the company could supplement its electrical production in cases of emergency along the New Hampshire and Maine coast. Inspiration for this translation was, of course, the emergency use of the Navy's aircraft carrier Lexington as a power plant at Tacoma, Wash., last winter (TIME, Dec. 2). Central Maine Power officials decided it would be cheaper to float an auxiliary plant up and down the coast than to build, in a scattered territory fed entirely by water power, emergency steam plants for use in time of drought. The Jacona's power installation is a 26,000-h. p. plant capable of producing 20,000 kilowatts.

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