Resolve Marine works to take problem-solving skill set beyond salvage

How do you grow a company that has reached the height of a niche market?

For Joseph Farrell III, the chief executive of leading marine salvage company Resolve Marine, the answer is to take the skills used in that niche to other markets.

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“We want to grow, and the market that we’ve been in traditionally, ship salvage, is quite static. It doesn’t grow or shrink,” he told TradeWinds, explaining the market can rise with major casualties, but its general trajectory is sideways.

“We can probably solve a lot more problems than we have solved in the past, and now we’re branching into other industries and markets.”

The family-run Fort Lauderdale company often ranks first or second in terms of revenue in emergency response and wreck removal, according to International Salvage Union data cited by Farrell.

The chief executive, who has spent just over a year at the helm since his father and Resolve Marine founder, Joseph Farrell Jr, shifted to the company chairman position, said the marine salvage firm has found that its marine problem-solving skills can be applied in marine services, the offshore wind sector and other areas.

Asked what his vision is for the family company, Farrell told TradeWinds it was to become a “household name” for problem solving in the marine space and beyond.

In salvage, Resolve Marine may have long achieved that goal, which was famously on display as the company sought to solve last year’s highest-profile shipping casualty.

Freeing the Dali

The firm was tapped to free the 9,962-teu container ship Dali (built 2015) after it struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in March 2024. After the bridge crumbled in seconds, a section of the span landed on top of the vessel’s bow, where hazardous cargoes were stowed.

Farrell said the same capabilities that Resolve Marine uses in salvage jobs like the Dali response can be applied, for example, in the offshore wind sector when turbine blades fail.

As it did with parts of the collapsed Baltimore bridge, the company has been using explosives to remove failed turbine blades, which are then picked up out of the water.

Other alternatives could cost millions of dollars more, and Farrell said this method is quicker and safer.

“We’re almost always called because there’s something that happened that was not expected,” he said at the company’s Fort Lauderdale headquarters.

As in the case of the Dali, Resolve Marine can get a call in the middle of the night, have its team on location that night or the next day and quickly have a response plan in place.

“To be able to turn a plan around in a few days and then start implementing it in three or four days, that’s something that a lot of companies just don’t do,” Farrell said, noting that offshore infrastructure companies are set up to handle long-term projects with a lot of lead time.

“We have no idea when our jobs are going to happen, but when they do, we need to be quick. So fast responsiveness, getting people and assets in location fast, using helicopters, using explosives, using what would be probably unconventional, unorthodox processes or practices to get things done quickly — it’s kind of our niche.”

Deepwater Horizon

Farrell said Resolve Marine first recognised the potential to apply its expertise to new markets following the high-profile 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident, which resulted in a fire and massive oil spill.

At the time, Resolve Marine lacked dedicated oil spill response capabilities, but the company recognised key similarities: fast decision-making, swift supply chain set-up and fast asset deployment.

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Today, oil spill response is part of Resolve Marine’s service portfolio. In 2019, the company responded to a spill from the 73,600-dwt bulker Solomon Trader (built 1994) after it grounded on a reef in the Solomon Islands.

But it has also found work beyond its traditional niche.

When the demolition of New York state’s Tappan Zee Bridge went awry and a span put the bridge built to replace it at risk, Resolve Marine was called in to safely remove the older structure.

Farrell, who was director of emergency response and business development at the time, said the company realised that the equipment it uses in salvage, such as heavy chain pullers, could provide a solution.

Its crews helped pull the bridge to keep it away from the new Governor Mario M Cuomo Bridge while detonating explosives on its legs, so they fell onto chains positioned across the bed of the Hudson River.

The rest — using chain pullers and two barges to lift the bridge from the river — was straightforward for a salvage company.

“It wasn’t salvage,” Farrell said of the job. “But it was moving heavy objects and trying to solve a problem where custom assets don’t exist.

“There was nothing in the US big enough to just lift that bridge section.”

Just like in marine salvage, the common denominator for many of Resolve Marine’s new breed of projects is that they happen at unpredictable moments that companies never want to have to deal with.

Farrell joked that at the end of a job, first-time customers often say, “I hope I never see you again”.

But for Resolve Marine, having a wider net for the types of one-off situations it can handle leads to repeat business.

Space projects

Farrell said: “We’re finding ourselves adding a lot of value and getting repeat calls from these customers.

“I mean, companies that shoot rockets into space call us all the time.

“There’s a value proposition to companies that need a quick solution, where it doesn’t make sense for them to change their whole model to solve these problems, because we can do it quicker and cheaper and safer.”

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To support its global problem-solving network profitably, Resolve Marine has also invested in its Fort Lauderdale facility and dive warehouse, but a major change is below the surface.

Hugh Leckey, Resolve Marine’s global salvage equipment manager, took TradeWinds on a tour of the revitalised site between this city’s seaport and international airport.

He explained how the layout and stacks of organised bins were part of the company’s adoption of a new Enterprise Resource Planning system across its global locations.

The ERP software allows more strategic, data-driven management of the company’s 7,000 salvage assets across 11 staffed sites.

Before upgrading its inventory system, the company often acquired assets for projects without the support of data-informed decisions.

Leckey said that Resolve Marine still wants to control its own assets, but he said it has been able to eliminate 2,600 of them in the past three years.

“We will end up condensing down a little bit more, but it means we can base decisions on facts and numbers,” he said of the ERP system.

Marine services

Resolve Marine has also been growing another line of business — its marine services unit, which is involved in dry-dock repairs, underwater welding, demolition, marine construction and other work.

The division is already more established on the US West Coast, where it has a shipyard in Alaska.

It is expanding on the Gulf Coast, where it recently added the business of Construction Solutions International in a March merger deal.

Given the volatile nature of marine salvage and other complex problem-solving work Resolve Marine undertakes, marine services offer a valuable source of stable income.

“You can see a model where, basically, there are similar resources needed to deploy to do these problem-solving jobs as we’re using on more common marine service operations — stabilising the company with the marine services,” he said.

“Then, when these big one-offs happen, we can serve those markets too.”