Baldor sells a cooling tower fan drive system that eliminates the motor / drive shaft / right-angle gear box with a directly coupled permanenet magnet motor running on a VFD.
It reduced maintenance costs, weight and space needed on cooling towers. Maybe the same approach would work for your system.
Sounds like a maintenance guy's nightmare: a big expensive semi-custom motor installed in an environment which makes offshore marine look rather innocuous. Sounds like a good solution for EPC companies who install a lightweight cooling tower and leave O&M to sort out the problems.
Have you got a link to the drive system? Sounds interesting. Just not for a cooling tower!