2016: TAPS exhibit installed at State Library Archives and Museum
The installation remains as an informative and impressive reflection of TAPS for all visitors to see, and as a legacy of Phil’s dedication and commitment.
After years of hard work and coordination, Alyeska employee Phil Hoffman, who passed away in 2019, proudly looked on as the new Andrew P. Kashevaroff State Library, Archives and Museum opened in Juneau, with a TAPS exhibit front and center.
With Phil’s help, Alyeska shipped an 8,500-pound installation package to Juneau that included 148 parts, from the pipe itself, to clamp bolts, to washers and Teflon slide plates, to VSM caps and a fiberglass module.
“I had to go through every nut and bolt to make sure a complete kit was collected and shipped,” Hoffman said at the time.
Lynden Transport, Inc., helped with the monstrous task of shipping. Hoffman made sure the crew that would assemble the pipeline kit – a group likely without a pipeliner among them – had instructions that were useful to follow.
“It was a challenge to prepare the assembly instructions to provide to someone who didn’t know anything about it,” he said, in 2016. “It would have been ridiculous to have sent the half dozen or more construction drawings. It seemed like just giving them a typical sketch should have been sufficient, and they seemed to have pulled it off.”
Ultimately, museum staff had to add additional beam support in the floor beneath the towering TAPS exhibit to protect the parking garage below. They welded the VSMs to the steel beams in the flooring, then built the floor around it.
The installation not only remains as an informative and impressive reflection of TAPS for all visitors to see; it exists on as a legacy of Phil’s dedication and commitment.
“If it wasn’t for Phil, this never would have happened,” Michelle Egan, Director of Corporate Communications said in 2016. “It was a huge job for him. It was identifying the pipe, identifying the VSMs, consulting on the installation and mapping out the assembly.”
How did it all look when it was finally installed? He had just one word to sum it up: “Awesome,” he said.
Read the original story of the installation work from 2016.
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1996: Bob Malone and Alyeska’s Open Work Environment