The naval pole at Bassens is the main ship repair site of Bordeaux Port Atlantique, the French state port authority for Bordeaux, and lies on the right bank of the Garonne. Its dry dock no. 3 takes Panamax vessels and is backed by a fitting-out quay and about three hectares of usable hardstanding, with shore power up to 400 A with neutral or 600 A without. The site is classified ICPE and ISPS, and work is done in dock or afloat alongside. Refit and retrofit, ship repair, workshop services, winter lay-up and ship recycling are sold, to cruise and river cruise vessels, yachts, ferries, catamarans, river shuttles and barges.
The same port authority runs two other repair sites, which are separate from this one. About ten kilometres upriver, in the Bassins a flot in central Bordeaux, there is a dry dock of 145 by 22 metres with calm-water fitting-out quays of up to 140 metres and three hectares of hardstanding. At Bacalan a slipway rated at 1,100 tonnes takes vessels of up to 60 by 12 metres, five at a time, with 4,000 square metres of hardstanding and boilermaking, mechanical, electrical and carpentry workshops.
Labour comes from the port's own Ateliers portuaires, about 90 specialist tradesmen with 5,000 square metres of covered industrial space for heavy maintenance and close to 80,000 square metres given over to industrial work. The machine shop covers 800 square metres under a 5-tonne overhead crane and handles conventional and CNC turning, milling, boring, portable on-site machining and metrology. Boilermaking has a 700 square metre shop and an 800 square metre assembly hall with 5-tonne and 10-tonne cranes, a 400-tonne press brake, a CNC press brake, plate rolls, a three-metre guillotine, a CNC plasma and oxy-fuel cutting table and a punching machine, working steel, stainless steel and aluminium. The electrical shop covers 300 square metres and the carpentry shop 250 square metres, the latter also handling docking and scaffolding. Engineering support runs to four account managers, a methods office of seven and a design office of five.
Bassens is one of the ship recycling facilities approved by the European Union, with several thousand square metres of sealed hardstanding inside a 3.5 hectare multipurpose area and equipment meeting ICPE, European and Hong Kong Convention requirements. Eight decommissioned naval vessels were dismantled in dock no. 3 over a 36-month programme, the longest dismantling project the port has hosted. The port provides the dock and the hardstanding; the dismantling itself is done by contractors engaged for the job.