Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion nears final stages

Officials expect the $3.9 billion Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel  expansion project to be substantially complete by February 2027, after years of boring underwater tunnels and widening lanes on land.

Currently, more than 2,000 workers are toiling on the state’s largest highway project daily, “and we’re not at our peak yet,” says Ryan Banas, the HRBT expansion project director.

In coming months, as construction of the tunnels wraps up, workers will start building 19 tunnel support buildings.

“Those structures are really important,” Banas says. “They provide room for all of our mechanical electrical equipment and house our operators who run the tunnels. That’s a really, really important job. They sit in a control room, they can respond to incidents in the tunnel on the approach bridges, shutting down lanes [when necessary], bringing in emergency services.”

When that work ramps up, likely this fall, the number of people working on the project daily will increase to about 2,400, Banas says.

In 2020, the Virginia Department of Transportation contracted with Hampton Roads Connector Partners, a joint venture led by FlatironDragados, to start expanding the bridge-tunnel that connects Hampton and Norfolk. The project, which was supposed to be completed in 2025, widens four-lane segments of the 9.9-mile Interstate 64 corridor to six lanes on land and eight underwater with twin two-lane tunnels. Connecting roads also will have additional lanes.

“In the early fall we’ll be shifting traffic onto our new eight-lane bridge,” Banas says. “Two lanes of our existing traffic will move onto that new eight-lane bridge. Crews have been working really hard on the existing shoulder of the existing roadway, widening that roadway, building mechanically stabilized earth walls, making drainage improvements, constructing overhead sign structures and guardrails — all of the safety features necessary.”

Much of the recent work on the bridge-tunnel has been conducted by Mary, the massive tunnel boring machine (TBM) constructed in Germany specifically for the HRBT’s expansion.

The $70 million piece of equipment is named after Mary Winston Jackson, a NASA scientist whose work was depicted in the 2016 film “Hidden Figures” about Jackson and two other Black female NASA scientists during the space race.

Mary the tunnel boring machine is roughly the height of a three-story building and the length of a football field. In April 2024 the machine began digging the first tunnel, and then took five months to be turned around to start digging the second tunnel, which Banas expected to be completed in September. Ultimately the second tunnel will have 1,193 interconnected high-strength concrete rings, Banas says.

This is an entirely different process than from 1952 to 2016, when VDOT would immerse tube tunnels underwater for automobile traffic.

“Simply put, they are long concrete pipes about 300 to 350 feet in length,” Banas says. “We use traditional dredging equipment, we dredge out the bay bottom, we bring in those tubes and we immerse them in place, we connect them end to end, and that’s how you construct the tunnel.”

Today, Mary excavates the bay bottom, and workers install interconnected tunnel liners, creating the tunnel as Mary continues mining. Banas notes that the tunnel liners are subjected to strict quality control to ensure they form a watertight, durable tunnel.

Banas describes the rings, which have nine segments, as “puzzle pieces. I have a 5-year-old at home. I remind him that all tunneling and all civil engineering is really building with big Legos. So, each of those nine pieces is a 20,000-pound segment that we build in a very specific order to construct a watertight tunnel.”

Once Mary’s work is completed, probably in the early fall, the machine will be dismantled and sold for parts. “Some of her electrical systems, hydraulic systems, rams, motors will be recycled,” Banas says.

“They’ll be repurposed, taken back to the manufacturer, refurbished and potentially used on additional machines. We’ll be parting ways with Mary, but her legacy will long live behind her.”