Workers hopeful of maintaining Portsmouth naval yard

KITTERY, Maine -- John Joyal, a welding instructor and 28-year veteran of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, was driving home from the yard Friday when his cellphone rang. It was his friend, another shipyard worker, who said the sprawling seaside complex where they repair nuclear-powered submarines might not be closing, after all.

Anthony Principi, chairman of the commission reviewing the Pentagon's list of military base closures, had asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to explain why he had recommended shuttering Portsmouth in Kittery, Maine, given that the Navy's own data show it is more efficient than the Pearl Harbor shipyard in Hawaii.

At home in Somersworth, N.H., Joyal, 49, booted up his computer, and read Principi's letter to Rumsfeld -- five times, he said. ''I'm tickled pink that they are asking for more clarification, more substantiation, more proof and evidence as to where DOD stands on Portsmouth," Joyal said yesterday, using the shorthand for the Department of Defense.

''I think Rumsfeld's got some explaining to do, and I can't wait to see what he's got to say," Joyal said.

Other shipyard workers, officials, and supporters of the complex greeted the letter yesterday with a mix of optimism and restraint, hoping that it signaled a small victory for the nation's oldest continuously operating naval yard, first established in 1800 at the mouth of the Piscataqua River. For weeks, elected officials, residents, and workers have been collecting donations, writing letters, and preparing for a hearing in Boston in an effort to keep the shipyard open, and preserve its 4,400 jobs.

Dubbed the ''Cradle of American Shipbuilding," Portsmouth built its first vessel in 1815, a 74-gun warship christened the USS Washington. During World War II, some 25,000 men and women worked at the shipyard, churning out 70 submarines for the American war effort. They launched four in one day. Today, Portsmouth supports a $283 million payroll, and its workers -- most of whom are civilians -- overhaul, repair, modernize, and refuel some of the Navy's top nuclear-powered submarines. About 60 percent of the workforce comes from Maine, about 40 percent from New Hampshire, shipyard data show.

On Wednesday, Principi's panel, the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission, will gather in Boston for the hearing.

''We're all working very, very hard doing the best we can do, but you know how Washington is -- sometimes you can move them, but you can't sell them," said Portsmouth Mayor Evelyn Sirrell, expressing a tinge of skepticism about the hearing. She plans to attend, joined also by local elected officials and retired Navy Captain William D. McDonough, a former commander of the shipyard and leader of the Save Our Shipyard Campaign.

Like others from the region, Sirrell has a deeply personal connection to the Portsmouth shipyard. Her first husband, an electrician, worked on the base until an accident, while he toiled alone aboard a submarine, cost him his life, she said. As a child, she watched her father head to work every day to the shipyard, where he welded boats. He considered the job one of the best paying in the seacoast region, Sirrell said.

Pentagon documents show Portsmouth was pitted against three other shipyards as Rumsfeld drafted his base-closure list: Puget Sound in Bremerton, Wash.; Norfolk in Virginia; and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The Pentagon decided Puget Sound and Norfolk had to stay open because they were so large that neither Portsmouth nor Pearl Harbor could assume the work, according to documents the Pentagon originally provided the commission.

In an analysis of the shipyards' value to the military, Portsmouth scored slightly higher than Pearl Harbor, but because Hawaii is located in the Pacific, where there is more Navy ship traffic, the military chose to close Portsmouth. Now, Portsmouth supporters are hoping to persuade Pirncipi's panel to overturn the closure recommendation, before the commission makes its recommendations to President Bush in September. Congress and the president must approve the closures.

''If this were a private industry, we would not be closing," said Frank Coleman, a diver at the shipyard since 1976, who was sipping a draft beer at the Corner Pub in Kittery. ''Why would you close one of the most successful bases?"

At Navy Yard Bar and Billiards, a popular hangout for shipyard workers in Kittery, workers take no small amount of pride in the fleet of deep-sea submarines they help maintain. Some nurse a bit of a rivalry with Pearl Harbor.

''We've been holding Pearl Harbor's head out of water for years," said Jim Procaccini, 55, a nuclear engineering instructor who has worked at Portsmouth for 23 years. ''Every time they get in trouble, and they're doing a reactor cooler pump or something, we'll go there and save them. And we do that for every Navy yard in the United States. We're the best at what we do."

He was convinced the yard would survive on its merits. So was Joyal. He planned to organize what he said would be 3,500 Portsmouth supporters to travel to the hearing in Boston on 75 school buses and 200 motorcycles. They would wear yellow T-shirts and carry banners declaring, ''Save Our Shipyard," he said. Though he was worried that Bush might be reluctant to save a shipyard in a state that voted Democratic in the presidential election, Principi's letter gave Joyal reason to hope, he said.

''If they look at the data, and pull out the political poison pill, Portsmouth will prevail," he said.

Globe correspondent April Simpson contributed to this report.