OLEAN, N.Y. — With sparks flying, steel is moving through North Olean as Cimolai-HY shipped off the last of its first major project Wednesday.
That project — part of the roof supports for the new Buffalo Bills stadium in Orchard Park — caps off years of work to get the facility converted from a steam turbine manufacturer to a structural steel fabricator, said general manager Carolyn Carbonneau. The company employs around 95, with around 50 directly involved in manufacturing on the floor of the facilities previously used by Clark Brothers, Dresser-Rand and Siemens Energy.
“We’re very proud. Everyone was proud to work on this,” Carbonneau said as employees milled around the loaded truck.
To date, she said, 400 tons of steel fabricated into 86 parts for the roof structure have been shipped. “If people look up there, they will see these. It’s at the very top.”
Not all of the steel for the roof supports came from Olean, Carbonneau said, with many other manufacturers working on the job due to the sheer scale of the stadium.
“I heard there were 11 shops working on these,” she said.
WITH THE STADIUM project pieces rolling out the door, Cimolai-HY officials said the project is just the beginning.
“We’re starting a lot of projects right now,” Carbonneau said, including several bridge projects in the Bronx.
In mid-February, the company will ship off the parts for a new bridge spanning the Genesee River — the first bridge project to be completed by Cimolai-HY’s Olean workers. Officials noted that the winter is a slow time for bridge manufacturing.
“In March we’re going to be ramping up,” she said, and more workers will be needed. “On the shop floor we’re at 50 people — we need to be 120 people. That’s with the current backlog — (and) we’re still bidding on other projects.”
The firm will look to hire more workers in February.
“Welders, fitters, people with robotics to run the machines and programmers. We’re going to have to support all the people on the shop floor,” she said.
Paying fabrication work began this last summer, she noted, including the startup work on the Bills project and several bridge projects in New York City. More steel rolled out for the Hudson Yards construction projects — an area a few blocks from Madison Square Garden in Manhattan that is being redeveloped by firm co-owner Related Companies.
The “HY” in Cimolai-HY refers to the Hudson Yards. Italian steel company Cimolai S.P.A. partnered with Related to purchase and overhaul the facility in North Olean.
In an odd coincidence, the company making some of the steel for the new Bills stadium shares an owner with one of the team’s fiercest rivals. Related’s founder and chairman, Stephen Ross, is the principal owner of the Miami Dolphins, who will play at the new stadium annually.
AUTOMATION HAS been the name of the game at Cimolai-HY, Carbonneau said. In the old Plant 1, a large machine can handle a hundred-foot-long piece of I-beam, adding supports and making holes for installation hardware with just three workers.
In another building, a computer-controlled laser cutting table as long as a football field can cut out steel in minutes that would have taken a worker with a hand torch hours. In the former testing facility, a custom 125-foot-long I-beam can be built out of flat stock, she said, with continuous welds the entire length of the beam.
When asked how long it would take to do such jobs by hand, “It would take days,” Carbonneau said, and when done by computer-controlled robots, “it’s only a few hours for the largest pieces.”
This work is possible right out of the gate, unlike how most steel fabricators start small and build up over a period of years or decades, Carbonneau explained, purchasing equipment and expanding their scope of work slowly. By comparison, Cimolai-HY jumped straight into the largest equipment to handle the largest jobs with large amounts of automation. As the equipment was installed, the first equipment could be used to fabricate the steel used to support the later machines.
But the process did have a major downside — a lack of certifications from previous work done by the facility.
In order to land the types of jobs the plant was designed to fabricate, the facility needed to receive the American Institute of Steel Construction’s Certified Bridge Fabricator-Advanced certification, Carbonneau said. The rating is the highest of three tiers for bridge fabricators, according to the AISC, which, according to the trade group’s website, is for projects “requiring an additional standard of care in fabrication and erection, particularly with regard to geometric tolerances.”
Typically, firms fabricate materials for bridges that are going to be installed, Carbonneau said, and inspectors review that work in order to issue certifications. But with no paying jobs due to a lack of certifications, Cimolai-HY asked to be able to build a sample work piece. As a pilot program, the AISC board agreed. A sample piece was built last spring to show the techniques and tolerances the company could bring to future bridge projects, and the certification was received in June.
“That allows us to go after contracts,” Carbonneau said, as well as picking up subcontracting jobs that now allow the facility to bring in the paying work that pays the bills.
Carbonneau said she would like to have the sample piece moved to the front entrance and painted as the facility’s sign for visitors and passers-by, a monument of sorts to the work done in Olean.
THAT SIGN WOULD go hand-in-hand with other signs at the site which point toward its past. While the majority of manufacturing equipment at the site was removed when Siemens Energy closed down production in 2022, some pieces remain and are used as needed — such as a large Ingersoll milling machine dating back to the Clark Bros. days. The overhead cranes capable of lifting a house now sport electromagnets used to move large stock from station to station.
Even Dresser-Rand-marked wood pallets and truck trailers are used to move materials around the production floor.
There are also some familiar faces. Carbonneau estimated that about 35% of the workers on site previously worked for Dresser-Rand or Siemens in Olean. Others are new to manufacturing, with Carbonneau crediting efforts by SUNY Jamestown Community College to push workforce investment and getting new workers the training they need to get on the floor.
For some jobs, European engineers and workers were brought in temporarily. Teams from the Netherlands came to Olean to install machinery, and several Italian employees are helping with setup and guiding the new workers, Carbonnaeu said.
For more than 100 years, the site was the center of heavy industry in the city. In 1916, Clark Bros. relocated from Belmont to the site — adjacent to the Socony-Vacuum oil refinery, as the company focused production for the oil and gas industry. Through various mergers it became part of Dresser-Rand.
German conglomerate Siemens bought Dresser-Rand in 2015, but in 2020 spun off Siemens Energy, which included several areas of the business tied to oil and gas industries as the firm aimed to focus more on renewable energy operations. Siemens Energy announced in February 2021 that it would close manufacturing in Olean by mid-2022, laying off more than 500 workers.
The company continues to employ around 300 on the campus, focused mainly on engineering and support for company operations.
Cattaraugus County lawmakers loaned Cimolai $2 million to get started in Olean, which will be forgiven if Cimolai meets hiring targets.
Cimolai pledged 219 jobs in its application for IDA tax breaks. By the start of 2024, the company had employed around 45 in Olean, rising to around 80 this past summer.
