Crews Packed a ‘Punch’ for Port of Beaumont Dock Demolition

Regardless of zero-visibility and unstable prerequisites, reconstruction of a dock structure at the Port of Beaumont in Texas is role for completion this month, six months ahead of the anticipated original agenda. 

The exhaust of personalized “punches” and a playbook to react nimbly to unanticipated prerequisites and constantly changing scenarios, crews on the $57-million mission led by McCarthy Constructing Cos. eliminated a partially collapsed dock that sat atop an older one and built a larger dock at the fourth-busiest U.S. shipping port.

With so many risks and unknowns, the team created a playbook of contingency plans. “We role parameters for what we may accomplish with out re-engineering and approval, say out to 5 feet in any path or beefing up reinforcement on a cap if need be,” says Robert Wood, McCarthy senior mission manager.

Kevin Drouet, an engineer at Lanier & Associates Consulting Engineers Inc., says the playbook came in handy a majority of the time. “It gave path to topic crews so that they may work with out coming back to gaze path. We anticipated at almost each pile that there was potential for it no longer to be pushed in the unique location due to the unknowns. In gain, we built flexibility into the pile locations so that we may shift.” 

When McCarthy won the impart to rebuild Main Avenue Terminal 1 at the port, crews encountered a concrete dock that had partially collapsed due to the steel pile corrosion. “It was a massive structure that collapsed in diversified ways,” says Wood. “A lot of it was underwater. What was down there? What’s the condition of the dock?”

Before removal may initiate, the mission team had to conduct research, including exhaust of photos of the original bushes dock from a museum, he says. “It was built in the early 1900s, and ironically was accumulated intact,” Wood says.

Navigating a Murky Past

In the Fifties, the concrete dock was built atop the bushes dock. “We had hand-drawn drawings” of that dock, which integrated rail tracks. At each pile twisted—60 of them—had been four steel piles capped by concrete, creating stable walls rising 10 feet up to the deck. Each wall was 3 feet broad, 40 feet prolonged, and 10 feet excessive.

A couple of piles corroded quite a bit that the load of these walls interconnected, says Wood.

Underwater mapping helped title the extent of the dock damage.
Image Courtesy McCarthy Constructing Cos.

All walls remained intact while piles began to collapse. The east discontinue of the dock collapsed nonetheless had been on a level plane and decent slope, he recalls. “As you went west, the face of the dock started to incline down more steeply; almost vertical.”

Before crews may initiate installing piles for the novel 300-feet-prolonged, 130-feet-broad dock, they had to resolve out safely waste and remove the concrete structure, aware of potential for more failures at some stage in the work. Divers had to navigate the sad depths of the Naches River, often moral feeling their way around a jungle of concrete and steel. 

“On the east discontinue, we despatched divers down to feel around by hand, and come up and validate what we had [mapped]” said Wood.

McCarthy fabricated a variety of demolition tools, called punches. “We tried a variety; first we had a torpedo-taking a peep deal weighing 20,000 lb,” says Wood. 

Crews dropped it down to take a peep at to break the dock apart. It was effective, somewhat, says Wood. “But once underwater, the place does it flow? We wanted feedback constantly.”

McCarthy designed a “punch” to assist in the dock demolition
Photograph Courtesy McCarthy Constructing Cos.

Another punch consisted of an approximately 40-feet pile with a welded steel tip, filled with concrete, strategically dropped to break away deck sections. The challenge was to be accurate to avoid creating more particles underwater.

After encountering a wall that had displaced 10 feet on the east discontinue, crews archaic a “guided” punch—taking the original pile and placing it inner another pipe pile. “We had a crane maintain the pile so that we may pull up the punch inner,” says Wood. “Then you may maintain the outer tube steady and pick it up and drop it savor a piston.”

As crews moved west with demolition, “we bolted on some legs to our information pile so that it almost sat on the deck and clamped on to sever down thru the deck vertically,” Wood adds.

With the majority of one wall beneath mud, McCarthy slid rigging down 40 feet, shackled the wall, and hauled it out while navigating unknown prerequisites underwater. Crews constantly came across surprising obstructions, such as a concrete seawall, boulders, and remnants of the 2 older docks. The exhaust of a land-facet crane, “we took the archaic torpedo punch and smashed and punched all the way down and peeled back the [concrete] topping slab savor a can opener.”

The 18-in.-dia bushes dock piles had been spaced each 3 in. “We had to take several out at a time,” says Wood. Divers clamped the piles and crews archaic a vibratory hammer to drag them out.

The novel prestressed concrete piles are 30 in. x 30 in. square, as prolonged as 140 feet and as heavy as forty five heaps. In a quest to decrease equipment sizes, the piles had originally been designed with voids about two-thirds of the dimension, nonetheless they started to break at some stage in the installation, Wood says. The team ultimately swapped them for stable principally 90-feet-prolonged piles. “A gigantic situation was secure all the particles out of there to make room for novel piles,” Wood says. Also, there was a threat of driving a novel pile into the mud and losing it totally. “We spent a lot of time scooping into the mud.”

The novel dock is the largest allotment of “the most a lot capital program ever” for the port, at some $400 million, says Brandon Bergeron, its director of engineering.  “We’re constructing a few diversified docks, a major rail expansion, and planning 30 novel acres of storage heaps and 10 acres of truck queuing areas.”

Aileen Cho, ENR’s senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and convalescing Original Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental Faculty, the place a reporter teaching the one unique journalism route encouraged her to apply for the LA Occasions Minority Enhancing Training Program. Her journalism training ended in her first reports about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Occasions and Original York Occasions. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in Original York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, the place she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many attention-grabbing projects and folks, and she gets drained of throwing her cats off her laptop in her dwelling office in Prolonged Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.