GRAND BAY -- As traffic rumbled along nearby Interstate 10, a long, insect-like orange helicopter rose into the air carrying a 7.5-ton section of reinforced fiberglass pipe. It hovered waiting for police cars a mile to the east and west to slow traffic enough to create a 200-foot-wide, vehicle-free gap across the busy expressway.

The gap appeared, and in moments the aircraft and its cargo had sailed over the interstate, headed for an open field beside the city docks in Bayou La Batre.

So began a more than 12-hour workday Wednesday, as a helicopter crew, state and local police and others coordinated the air delivery of 25 chimney liner sections -- built by Grand Bay's newly arrived Erishigs Inc. -- to the Bayou's city docks for a planned July 18 barge trip to a power plant in Newburgh, Ind.

"The real story here is not these cans we're flying out today. This is about a company and its people bouncing back from Hurricane Katrina," said Rod Courtney, vice president in charge of field operations for Ershigs Inc.

Courtney stood among more than 100 guests, many of them Ershigs' own plant workers, who watched the helicopter work as they chatted and ate a catered breakfast under the shade of a white canopy Wednesday. A sound system played a bevy of carefree songs like "Tequila" by The Champs and Chubby Checker's "The Twist."

Two years ago, Wednesday's celebrations might have seemed a faraway dream to workers at Ershigs' Biloxi operation. In late August 2005, the dockside facility was blindsided by the worst natural disaster in American history, Hurricane Katrina, and forced to find a new home.

Earlier that year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had instituted its Clean Air Interstate Rule, which requires coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions of the pollutants nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide.

This created massive demand for large-scale scrubber systems, which require exactly the type of pipe linings manufactured by Ershigs. Faced with a multimillion-dollar backlog, the operation's parent company, Houston-based Denali Inc., began searching for a new Ershigs site.

Denali officials decided in October 2005 to acquire Lape Industrial Fiberglass Inc., a Grand Bay company whose facility just off Interstate 10 was nestled in a clearing surrounded by live oaks.

The Biloxi site had a dock facility, but the new site is more than a 10-mile drive from the nearest Gulf access, said Tom Pilcher, Ershigs' president, who is based in Tulsa, Okla., but attended Wednesday's celebration. The company's leaders decided to solve the problem by hiring Central Point, Oregon-based Erickson Air-Crane.

The aircraft working Wednesday was an Erickson S-64F Air-Crane, built by Erickson Air-Crane. It is nearly identical to a Sikorsky S-64F, originally a Sikorsky Aircraft product. Erickson bought the helicopter's type certificate and manufacturing rights in 1992, company officials said.

Sydney Howard stood in an air-conditioned container filled with personnel supplies a few hundred feet from the tent where breakfast was being served Wednesday. The Ocean Springs resident started working for Ershigs four months before Katrina, and now works as the company's equipment man.

"There was nowhere to work after Hurricane Katrina. Even Ershigs wasn't there anymore," Howard said. "But they kept paying us anyway. They never skipped a paycheck."

Howard is one of the 15 or so employees from south Mississippi who decided to stay on with Ershigs after the move to Grand Bay, even though it increased his commute from 10 miles to more than 30. "I've never worked for a company this loyal before. I'm going to stick with them."

The company originally planned to deliver the fiberglass linings directly to a barge at the Bayou La Batre city docks, but the barge has been delayed, said R.L. "Bo" Povilat, head of estimating and contracts at Ershigs in Grand Bay.

The company and the city of Bayou La Batre initially signed a three-day contract, at $2,500 a day, to rent the dock space. Monday, the City Council approved a 24-day extension to the contract at a cost of $1,500 a day. The city will be paid a total of $43,500, according to the contract.

To load the chimney sections onto the barge, the company plans to transport its own cranes to the Bayou La Batre city docks when the barge arrives on July 18, Povilat said.

A thunderstorm caused a temporary helicopter shutdown late Wednesday afternoon, but the company finished delivering all the cans to the Bayou by sundown, Povilat said.