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Tag: VDOT

HRBT expansion boring? Yes and no

Already the largest project ever tackled by the Virginia Department of Transportation, the $3.8 billion Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion will kick into gear later this year when a $70 million custom-built tunnel boring machine (TBM) begins carving out an underwater path for twin two-lane tunnels.

Construction on the HRBT expansion, which will increase tunnel and roadway capacity along 9.9 miles of Interstate 64 between Hampton and Norfolk, began in October 2020 and is scheduled for completion in November 2025. 

It’s only the fourth time that a tunnel boring machine will be used on a U.S. roadway project, including tunnels in Seattle, Miami and the Parallel Thimble Shoal Tunnel under construction at the nearby Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.

Standing the height of a four-story building and measuring the length of a football field, the TBM’s front end consists of a 46-foot-diameter rotating cutterhead that bores through soil and rock strata as it creates an approximately 45-foot-wide opening for the new tunnels. Virginia Beach middle schoolers dubbed the machine “Mary” after Mary Winston Jackson, the late NASA mathematician and aerospace engineer depicted in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures.”

Hampton Roads Connector Partners, a joint venture led by Dragados USA Inc., is the design-build team for the project. It contracted with German firm Herrenknecht AG to fabricate the boring machine, which arrived at the Port of Virginia aboard three vessels in December. Crews have been preparing a 70-foot-deep launch pit on South Island, near Norfolk, where the TBM will be assembled and readied to start excavation by mid-2022.

“We are working aggressively to get the launch pit ready,” says James Utterback, VDOT’s project director for the HRBT expansion. “This is one large project that has a series of big projects inside it and lots of unique construction operations that need to come together.”

Once underway, a hydraulic cylinder will move the TBM about 50 feet per day as the cutterhead bores a two-lane tunnel to North Island, near Hampton, a process expected to take about a year. At North Island, it will take 4 to 6 months to rotate the machine on a specially built turntable in preparation for its return trip, boring a parallel twin two-lane tunnel to South Island. The return trip is expected to take 10 to 12 months, with the total process taking about 2½ years.

HRBT tunnel boring machine’s name will be ‘Mary’

Chosen from several entries submitted by Hampton Roads area middle school students, the massive underwater tunnel boring machine (TBM) that arrives later this year to dig new tunnels for the $3.8 billion Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion project will be named Mary, in honor of Mary Winston Jackson, a NASA scientist depicted in “Hidden Figures.”

St. Gregory the Great Catholic School students entered the name in a contest held by the Virginia Department of Transportation to name the tunnel boring machine, which is set to arrive this fall. Project officials announced the name Wednesday morning. The winning group of students from the Virginia Beach school created a video explaining why the machine should bear Jackson’s name. “We wanted to pick a female scientist that had a relationship with our area,” said one student, while another said he was “just extremely surprised we won.”

Jackson, who was born in 1921 in Hampton, was a mathematician and engineer who was hired to work at NASA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in 1951 as a human “computer.” After two years, Jackson was hired to work for an engineer in Langley’s Supersonic Pressure Tunnel. In 1958, she became NASA’s first Black female engineer, and she retired in 1985. She died in 2005 at the age of 83. Jackson was played by actress/singer Janelle Monáe in the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures,” which also includes portrayals of her colleagues Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan.

The TBM is being built in Germany under specifications for the Bridge-Tunnel; it will be brought in pieces to the South Island this fall. When assembled, it will be about 46 feet in diameter and 350 feet long — roughly the height of a three-story building and the length of a football field. According to VDOT and the Hampton Roads Connection Partners (HRCP), the joint venture responsible for design and construction work on the HRBT expansion, digging will begin in early 2022 and conclude in 2024. The entire project, which is expected to be completed in 2025, will increase tunnel and interstate capacity along 9.9 miles of Interstate 64 between Hampton and Norfolk, digging two new two-lane tunnels and building four new lanes across the water, as well as adding lanes on connecting roads.

HRCP is a joint venture led by New York-based Dragados USA Inc. and includes Vinci Construction, Flatiron Construction Corp. and Vinci subsidiary Dodin Campenon Bernard.

The name Mary will be prominently displayed on the TBM during the project, said José Martin Alos, HRCP’s project executive, who noted it’s considered good luck to name the tunnel boring machine before work starts. The HRBT expansion is only the fourth project in the United States involving a TBM.

Here’s the name announcement video:

 

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