Photo courtesy of Toronto Transit Commission Seven months after almost simultaneously completing one tunneling segment, twin TBMs break through headwalls within a day of each other in mid-June. Related Links: Spanish Firms Will Help Build Toronto Subway Extension Toronto Subway Wins Some Funds Yorkie beat Torkie, but only by a day. After 945 meters of digging southward, the first 6.4-m-dia tunnel-boring machine broke through the headwall of the extraction shaft at what will be Black Creek Pioneer Village Station on June 13. The next day, its twin TBM, nicknamed Torkie, followed. The earth-pressure-balance TBMs did not match the unusual feat
Related Links: Concerns Over Specialty Contractor Failures, Economy Abound at CFMA's Annual Conference Construction Financial Management Association Foreign firms' growing interest in U.S. design-build projects and public-private partnerships (P3s) may turn big contractors into "the pretty girl at the dance" but, in some cases, also might leave out smaller firms, industry experts recently cautioned in response to questions from officials of those very firms.P3s are "picking up at a fast pace, with 33 states having P3 legislation," said James Merrill, managing director with Star America Capital Advisors. Merrill was a panelist on the subject at the annual meeting, held last
Related Links: Florida Awards Groundbreaking Highway Contract P3 Delivery Drives Construction Speed on Florida's I-595 Project The mission: to shoehorn three new 10.5-mile-long reversible toll lanes into the middle of a six-lane interstate highway—including work on 63 bridges and 2.5 miles of the Florida Turnpike—while minimizing disruptions to up to 200,000 daily vehicles in the Fort Lauderdale area of Broward County, Fla.The method: a concessionaire agreement with a design-build construction contract, a first for the Florida Dept. of Transportation (FDOT). The $1.8-billion Interstate 595 widening project also came with plenty of complexity, including southern Florida's quirky geology, various stakeholders and
Photo Courtesy of FEMA In May in Mantoloking, N.J., the cleanup contractor uses floating booms to contain debris set for removal. Related Links: ENR's Complete Coverage of Sandy Recovery Efforts Federal Aid for Post-Sandy Rebuilding Rolls Out After Sandy, FEMA Flood Maps Are a Moving Target How The Corps Removed 500 Million Gallons In 13 Days In NYC Viewpoint: The Next Steps for New York City Flood Protection Subway Signal Teams Slog On Ideas abound, reconstruction is rolling, and funding is flowing, although not at the same speed and strength with which Superstorm Sandy walloped New York City and the
The Thursday before Sandy made landfall, Thomas Creamer, Army Corps of Engineers chief of operations for the New York district, touched base with other districts that might be needed.
The 15 million gallons of seawater that Superstorm Sandy dumped into the three-year-old South Ferry subway station in lower Manhattan are gone. What still lingers are what specific measures the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's New York City Transit division (NYCT) will take to safeguard the station when it reopens. Photo Courtesy of MTA Submerged: Located on Manhattan's southern tip, the South Ferry station took on 15 million gallons of water. Officials are studying how to flood-proof it. Related Links: Sandy Deals A One-Two Punch To Big Apple South Ferry Terminal: Project Of the Year The $545-million South Ferry subway station at
Photo Courtesy of TxDOT One of 12 precast tied-arch bridge segments sits on self-propelled transporters rolling to its final destination over the Trinity River. Designers envisioned a mix of efficiency and architecture. Related Links: Youtube Homepage of 7th Street Bridge 7th Street Bridge Fact Sheet (PDF) Rolling and rising methodically into place over the next month, 12 arches are forming what Texas Dept. of Transportation officials believe will be the world's first precast-concrete network-arch bridge. The novel design's ultimate goal is to alleviate congestion in the Fort Worth corridor. The new West 7th Street Bridge posed big post-tensioning and placement
Creating a mechanically stabilized mountain and building a pair of massive, buried bridge structures are all part of a day's work for the crew working on the elevated and sloping runway project at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (FLL). Related Links: Broward County Picks Designers for South Runway Project Balfour Beatty, Cummings Land Fort Lauderdale Terminal Contract The entire project, estimated at $750 million, is designed to extend the boundaries of the airport by raising one of its runways up and over a major highway and rail line.Targeted for completion by September 2014, the work is testing the limits of contractors
Photo Courtesy of Simon Floyd/Microsoft The computer giant is hoping to ramp up sales of its Surface Pro for Windows 8 by enticing engineers with its ability to work with many types of CAD filestwo simultaneouslyand the versatile, sleek design of the device. Microsoft is also promoting its 3D Viewer for JT app. Photo Courtesy of Simon Floyd/Microsoft Related Links: Construction IT Managers Eying Microsoft Surface Pro Release Microsoft is wooing the construction industry with its new Surface Windows 8 Pro, a touch-screen tablet that can act as a desktop workstation for an engineer in the field or in transit.
Related Links: A Gigantic Turnaround for a Giant Tunneling Machine Ports Seek Rising Tide of Public, Private Funds Bouygues Starts $1-Billion Miami Tunnel When the 2,000-ton cutterhead of a tunnel-boring machine named Harriet made a U-turn last summer in Miami, the event marked a major turning point for the Port of Miami tunnel project.After Harriet broke through the end of one 4,200-ft-long, 42.3-ft-dia tunnel under Biscayne Bay last July, crews with the design-build team, led by Bouygues Civil Works Florida, used a giant Teflon turntable to rotate the TBM's cutterhead and shield in preparation for boring a twin tunnel in
