A Brobdingnagian Business

T Bailey Produces Water Tanks and Pipes
That Can Dwarf a House

Article and photos by Janet O’Mara

It would be easy to overuse the word “big” when talking about T Bailey, Inc., an Anacortes-based company founded in 1991 that specializes in heavy/civil industrial construction, steel fabrication and tank construction. Indeed, like in Jonathan Swift’s imaginary land of giants, Brobdingnag, of Gulliver’s Travels, the company’s projects themselves are impressively huge in size, and growth has been substantial in each of the last seven years.

Gross sales this year will be nearly $30 million, more than double that of last year, reports Gene Tanaka, company president. He continually stresses that the company’s success is equally shared with his partner and vice president, Darrell Lehmann; with their wives, Cheryl and Michele, “for their continuing support”; and with their hundred-plus employees.

“We have an incredibly loyal, talented and knowledgeable group of people working here, both in the craft and administration sides,” Tanaka stresses. “They are very dedicated; the work gets done because they’re all very willing and capable.”

The employees, many of them union boilermakers, work on construction sites or at the Anacortes headquarters, 12441 Bartholomew Road, on the neck of March’s Point. All projects — for the most part huge water tanks and pipes — are built to custom requirements, most installed on-site, for clients in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska and Hawaii.

“Most of the work is either publicly bid or pursued on a competitive negotiation,” Tanaka notes. “What we do is pretty specialized.”

The more than six acres of property at the Anacortes headquarters include a 40,000-square-foot enclosed fabrication facility, hydraulic rolls, a plasma cutting machine and a 14,000-square-foot “wheelabrator” (to blast steel surfaces) and painting facility to support the fabrication operation. Last year, the company rolled, cut, shaped and welded 15 million pounds of steel plate.

 

No middleman

“Darrell and I started out as general contractors to perform this type of construction work,” Tanaka explains, “and we have expanded the fabrication-facility aspect of our business to also fabricate and sell products directly to end users.”

Tanaka and Lehmann met in 1987 and worked together for several years on projects in another company. “We had an agreement,” recalls Tanaka, “that if I created the right situation, we were going to do it together — and it happened a few years after that.”

Their backgrounds are quite different. Tanaka has a degree in construction management and experience in various areas of the construction industry. Lehmann has been in the boilermaker trade for more than 30 years, much of that in remote Alaska construction. “Combining our backgrounds makes us an ideal team,” says Tanaka. “If there were two of me or two of him, we wouldn’t have this company.”

A successful businessman also proud of his family, Tanaka explains how the name of his company was born. “The ‘T’ is for ‘Tanaka,’” he says, “and ‘Bailey’ is the name of our daughter, now 10 years old.”

Worldwide, there are “plenty” of companies that do what T Bailey does, he says, but in the Northwest, only two or three. “We’re a unique, multifaceted company because we do not only the earthwork, but also the underground utility and concrete work, as well as fabricate and install what we produce here,” he explains. “It helps with scheduling; it keeps the project always under our own control as much as possible,” he notes.

“It also takes us through low times if we have the ability to do more than one thing, so it was calculated to first keep things ‘fun,’ but it also creates a way to keep work coming in,” he explains. “If one thing dries up, it won’t be the end of us.”

 

Multimillion-gallon tanks

The large fuel and water tanks are one typical category of projects. For example, the company built:

• Three 4-million-gallon fuel tanks, Anchorage International Airport

• A 3-million-gallon water tank, 65 feet in diameter and 136 feet tall, Redmond

• Nine 50,000-gallon fuel tanks, Tin City, Alaska

• A 4-million-gallon water tank, 160 feet in diameter, Point Hope, Alaska.

The company is just beginning construction on a 12-million-gallon water tank in Clearview, Wash.

Every project is unique, according to Tanaka. At the Naval Air Station Whidbey, for example, T Bailey constructed a fire-fighting training facility in the form of a structural-steel mock-up of a fighter jet with fuel and water piping to simulate jet fuel fires, as well as a control building and high-temperature resistant concrete pads.

Large pipes — big enough to dwarf a man standing inside — are another type of project, Tanaka explains. In Bend, Ore., for example, the company built a long, 8-foot-diameter pipe and “snaked it underground and across a canyon” to divert and enclose an irrigation canal.

Power generation also is proving to be a strong market niche for the company. At power plants that are being built or retrofited, the company fabricates and erects storage tanks, exhaust duct work or stacks that range from 180 feet to 200 feet tall, all made of heavy steel plate and structural steel. In Keahole, Hawaii, for example, the company fabricated and installed ducts and stacks for a turbine-powered, cogeneration power plant operated by Hawaiian Electric.

“We also are one of the first fabricators to land a contract to make wind turbine towers that are going up along the Columbia River for generating renewable, clean power,” reports Tanaka.

“We’re excited and happy to see our progress,” he says of T Bailey, which ranked 19th on the Skagit top-50 list of privately held companies, published last April by The Skagit County Business Monthly.

“We had a vision and we planned for it — but each year, the actual results have exceeded those of the previous year,” he says with a smile. “The opportunities continue to exceed what we planned for.”