>> Good afternoon and welcome
to the 19th Schnabel Engeneering Lecture.
My only job here is to introduce
our host and that always a pleasure for me.
Alan Cadden is a principal at
Schnabel Engineering and he's a personal friend.
A person that I respect very much,
Alan has first come first,
he's a Hokie. He
did not want to remind me when that happened,
but he's certainly a very proud Hokie.
He is somebody who has been always a very good friend of
the geotechnical engineering program and
we appreciate that very much.
Alan has 35 years of
experience in the geotechnical engineering field,
for he has done,
and if I start listing all the things that he has done,
I probably would use all the time for the lecture.
But also something that distinguishes
Alan is that he has always been
very focused on servicing the profession.
He has played many different roles in
Geo Institute when he
was president of the Board of Directors.
But also in other organizations,
including ADAC,
the International Workshop on Micropiles,
and several other organizations.
I do have a long list of things that I could say here,
but I don't want to take
full time from the reason that you have come here,
which is to watch our lecture. Please Alan [OVERLAPPING].
>> Doctor Rodriguez, appreciate that. My notes here.
The beginning, it is always great being
back in Blacksburg here in Schnabel
enjoys the opportunity to come down,
especially when you let us
lecture in a beautiful place like this.
I love this [inaudible] campus,
so this is nice to be here and everything.
I'm happy to be able to introduce our 19th lecturer.
It's a very exciting time in civil engineering world,
with significant workloads and
banking projects all over the place.
But never really hurts a civil engineering community,
but Washington hands out
a trillion and a half dollars or so.
Nice to keep us going there,
just a little bit of background on Schnabel Engineering.
For those of you who are not aware of the firm.
Schnabel is approaching 70 years old at this time,
or young, depending on your perspective.
Here, doesn't sound so bad.
We have about 30 offices
across the country and from those offices,
we offer services pretty much
throughout the United States and even around the world.
These services grew from traditional
geotechnical engineering
back when I started or two ago.
To really encompass
geostructural design, dam engineering,
tunnel design so soup to nuts on all the fun
geotechnical and the structure out there.
For me, some of
the more exciting things that we've been working on
recently involves applications of
innovation around data science,
digital twins, advanced visualization.
Been trying to stretch a little bit
of what we do traditionally in
the geotechnical at some of these new technologies.
Schnabel is a 100% employee owned company,
so it's an ESOP, corner us sometime.
I'll be happy to explain it to you,
but it is really nice to be really an owner in your own.
That is the basis, so bringing these lectures to
campus each year really is an opportunity for us to
share some of the civil engineering experiences.
Give you a bit of insight on how your career may evolve,
even positively, some of the other challenges that
are in store for coming years.
Today, I'm thrilled to be able
to introduce a fellow Hockey,
who has been integral with some of
the most incredible infrastructure
projects throughout her career.
I have a chance to share some of those stories with her.
They're just fascinating, Doctor Martha Gross
is the Executive Director
of Transit Development and Delivery.
Leading the major project
Department for the Maryland Department
of Transportation Maryland Transit.
Prior to joining MTA this past spring,
she worked for the Virginia Department of Transportation
where she led the development of
the $4,000,000,000 Campton Roads
Bridge Tunnel Harbor Closing,
and held senior commercial and technical roles
in the projects delivery.
Rater for career, including
previous private sector experience
with top 10 construction contractors,
global and engineering consultants.
She's worked on over
$15,000,000,000 of projects under construction.
I'm sure I've seen $15 billion.
Doctor Gross is a member of
the Transportation Research Board
Standing Committee on Tunnels and Underground structures.
Published author on major project delivery.
He holds advanced degrees in civil engineering
and business from Penn State, Virginia Tech.
Was a Full bright scholar at
the University of Stuttgart in Germany.
Today, Doctor Gross will present
underground construction development and
delivery of complex infrastructure projects.
As geotechnical engineers know,
no matter how many zeros are in the cost of our project,
unknown challenges of the underground construction
often has the most complexity for dollar.
Recognizing complexity and
not simple cost qualitative aspects of
project planning helps us ensure resources and
mindsets in the right place
to develop and deliver these projects.
What I understand that to be?
Geotechnical professionals are
the most important people in infrastructure.
I understand the graduate student
organization was recently
at the Hanton Roads Bridge Tunnel expansion project,
so I think you'll be excited
to hear some of the inside stories,
see some of these images here.
I understand some of the complexities and exclusions that
are collected in
the textbooks here and you see right here.
Without further ado, please join me in
welcoming
Doctor Gross
as our 19th Schnabel lecturer.
>> Your resume, think
about your resume, the experience section.
What's on it? What do you plan to put on it?
Somewhere in there, you're going to have,
if you don't have already,
a list of dollar values,
how big were the projects you worked
on and there's nothing wrong with that.
But that just shows how intrinsically we think about
our accomplishments in terms
of the size of projects we worked on.
I want to speak some today
on challenging that assumption.
What makes a complex project?
Should we value some, maybe
in terms of other things and zeros.
The amount of costs that goes into them.
Should we respect some challenging things that
maybe have a lot smaller project size?
Today, we're going to look into
defining a complex project,
myths and facts and
then look at the skills that we need for these.
Because you will inevitably deal with
complex projects of some shape
and size during your career.
We'll have an opportunity to talk some about
the Hampton Roads Bridge tunnel expansion
with some illustrations as we heard.
Things you might not have seen
either during visits to the project
or read about during within published materials.
Then finally, we'll summarize that all with
some tools that you can use for managing complexity,
not just in the post-graduation setting.
But as well as the
career-building thoughts that you can be
integrating now as you plan your next steps.
With that, let's dive into
the definitions, complex infrastructure projects.
First, I want to challenge
this myth that we talked about.
The complexity is simply proportional to project cost.
Some things have a lot more complexity per dollar
than other projects do and
I want to offer a few examples of that.
As we heard just a moment ago,
I recently moved from the highway space
to the transit space.
I'm finding for a fact when you have a transit project
that's worth a certain amount, contract value.
There's much more complexity, many more stakeholders,
many more layers to connect and keep
together with a traditional highway project.
We also see that underground projects,
much more complex and the equivalent dollar value
of the surface project.
Finally, a standalone projects versus modular,
and I'll show you that with an example on the next slide
so we can get a feel for what that complexity is like.
Imagine two projects that have
the exact same dollar value.
One of them box culverts, let's say, hypothetically,
we would were to replace all the box culverts in
the Commonwealth of Virginia, every single one of them.
That would easily be a multi billion dollar project.
But intuitively, you know that's
not a complex project because modular,
you're doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Now, think of another project that might also
be a multi-billion dollar undertaking.
Here's a tunnel boring machine.
Instantly you see this and your brain tells you
that's a complex project. What's the difference?
What are some of these things that help us
intuitively lean toward complexity here,
but not complexity there?
Let's feel that apart. What are some elements of
complexity that help us say one project is harder,
one project has more to do with another?
One is, many stakeholders,
because the more stakeholder you
have, the more touchpoints,
the more coordination, the more people
you have to keep happy,
in addition to delivering that technical skill.
Maybe there's a project that has
a lot of political disability.
If something goes wrong, it ends up in the newspaper,
and there are additional pressures and complexities that
arise from that additional level of stream disability.
Maybe it's a project like the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel
with new technology.
That tunnel boring machine was
of a type that has the largest of its size
ever of its type ever to be used from its manufacturer.
There were some questions having to do with
that new technology. Many unknowns.
This is where geotechnical engineers
shine because just the fact of
working underground means that
there's so many things you don't know.
This tends for geotechnical projects more
directly into the field of having
greater complexity just by their nature.
Finally, I've picked on the topic of nonlinear outcomes.
Some projects, if you put a certain amount of effort in,
it's not proportional to the outcome that comes out.
I'm going to digress slightly here because one of
my themes throughout the lecture is going
to be connecting across fields.
You'll hear that number of times.
And some of you may have done business studies
or worked in business or will have business studies.
If you do or if you have,
you'll see a theme like this in
management theory that talks about acronyms
that management studies uses to
characterize uncertainty and complexity.
I actually came up with my list independently of this,
but it just goes to show that business theory
recognizes this whole this whole concept of complexity,
very similarly to how we apply
it in infrastructure space.
Let's go after another myth.
Another myth is a project that starts out being
challenging and complex is going to
stay difficult and complex all the way through.
All those elements we saw on
the previous slide are going to stay constant.
They're always going to be challenging
us each step of the way.
The fact is, complexity
varies during a project's lifetime.
Something can be very challenging at the beginning,
where the visibility is high,
where that stakeholder coordination isn't yet sorted out.
That can simplify over time.
That means the people who start a project
often are going to need a much greater skill
set being to deal with complexity
and folks who may be in the middle of a project.
Hasten to add some projects pick up,
and complexity at the end,
depending what things are maybe to
work out project resolution.
Even so, that supports the point.
The complexity varies during projects lifetime.
That's good for realizing not only
how it applies to one's own skill set,
but if you're a manager staffing a project,
you need to recognize skills at the beginning,
may be different from the skills you need to
staff one part way through.
Let me illustrate that latter point
about project complexity varying
during the course of a project.
Anybody recognize this bridge? Yes.
>> [inaudible]
>> This one It's another long span bridge.
This one's a little farther south. We have any takers.
>> It's replacement for the old Cooper River Bridge.
>> Cooper River Bridge. Yes. The Arthur Ravenel Bridge
in Charleston, South Carolina.
I got to work on this project as
a construction field engineer,
and it was a dream job for me.
I was just three years in my career at that point.
I had studied structural engineering,
and it was my dream when I was in
college to work on a table stated bridge.
I never imagined it would happen so soon in my career.
This was just a joy to be on a project.
It was every bit as beautiful
as it looks at this picture.
I worked on that project for a year and a half.
Suddenly, I got a notification
from a home office construction company.
They said, Martha, we need to take you off
Cooper River Bridge replacement partway through
and send you to this project.
It's hard to figure out
a more conventional diamond interchange than this,
but that's exactly what it is.
This is Virginia Route 164,
8:00 P.M. Terminals Boulevard
Interchange and the Booming Metropolis of Portsmouth,
Virginia. Charleston to Portsmouth.
Why do you think the company did this?
This was Virginia's first design-build roadway project.
The Cooper River Bridge was in its mid-stage.
The complexity had leveled out.
Even though it was a very flashy project on paper,
made for beautiful postcards,
it had leveled out where the complexity
was at a lower level.
This project was just starting up.
It was at its early stages,
a lot of stakeholder management,
a lot of dealing with an agency that
had never done design-build before.
As a result of this, I got to work with some of
the company's most talented managers
and most complex thinkers in solving
things that I had never run across in my career before.
I was working with the manager
who became my boss for this project.
I was encouraged to
plant the seeds and go to graduate school,
and come to Virginia Tech.
This was a career changer,
even though going from a project
that was middle to low complexity,
to a project that was high complexity,
seemed very counterintuitive to me at the time,
but ended up propelling
my career in a way that I never expected.
All right. So we talked about nonlinear.
How many people played with one of these growing up?
Slinky here. Yes. Played with those.
And the great thing about a slinky is
it behaves the same every time.
But how many of you once stretched
your slinky so far it never came back?
I did that too.
That's that nonlinear thing.
The slinky suddenly behaved in a way that nothing you
knew had ever given you
a reason to predict that it would behave a different way.
We learned about Hook's law,
and everything is proportional until it isn't.
Similarly, in projects,
especially when you get into this realm of complexity,
we can't extrapolate from the
known and automatically that will
assume it applies over
all possible ranges, just like the slinky.
Suddenly, without warning reaches
that point where it stops behaving.
The nonlinear.
An application of how that applies in
the complex project space is,
let's say there's a construction company that's
good at $100 million projects.
A decent size, but they're good at them.
They have a good pattern.
The company says, well, maybe.
What if we did a one billion dollar project?
What if we just took the same skills and mindsets,
stretch them by 10 times?
Maybe we would be able to do that.
Answer, things don't extrapolate that way on that scale.
You figuratively have to take off your old head
and put on a different head
because these things are non linear.
You can't say the skills that help me when I did small,
simple projects with
the exact same skills when I stretched them,
that help me with large, complex projects.
The slinky is good reminder,
good analogy of how things work up to a point,
and then we need to put on a different level of thinking.
I stole this diagram from
McKenzie report that's talking about
major projects and the kinds of skills
and mindsets that are needed to develop them effectively.
On the y-axis, we have
what does the organizational skill and
capability need to have
in order to make that project happen well.
On the X-axis, we have project size,
and I'd like to say complexity.
What we see here is that
for an initial level of complexity,
when a project is not complex,
that gray level, the methodology, the systems,
and the processes are completely
sufficient to get that project delivered.
But at some point, just like
the slinky stopped being linear,
when you get a project past
a certain level of complexity,
you start needing mindsets and
practices that you never knew existed?
Maybe you never ran into or never identified
even a characteristic that
could be an engineer's skill set.
This is that nonlinear aspect.
Another way to think of this is,
this is a science project delivery.
This might, for instance, be what you're
learning in your engineering classes now.
Here's the principles that follow the rules.
Here's the things that you can calculate with a formula.
It behaves the same way.
There's principles that always apply,
and that's the science of what you have to
have for successful project delivery.
You can't do an engineering project at
all without having the science behind it.
But when you get past a certain level of complexity,
then you start needing this additional blue triangle,
the art, the mindsets,
the practices, the things that don't
follow the linear rules that you've seen in your studies.
Let's unhack that a little bit.
What does this mean practically?
If we understand what these skills
are in the blue triangle,
those are mindsets and practices,
as we saw on the previous slide.
Just for illustration,
some indicative mindsets are listed out there.
That's not what I want to focus on
as part of this lecture there.
I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into
practices that we can take on as engineers,
understand how we can manage
complexity in our own pursuits.
One aspect that I want to emphasize in
this talk is connecting across fields.
I'm going to steal that red arrow from
the previous slide and put it right here to emphasize.
If you have one takeaway from this lecture,
I want it to be connecting across fields.
It's the skill that engineers need to develop for
successful management complex projects.
But what is theory without an application?
Let's dive in what that looks
like in a practical project.
We'll use the Hampton Roads Bridge
Tunnel to explain this.
But I'm not going to give you a technical tour
on the science of the HRBT.
I'm going to touch on the art part of it,
and I've chosen out some examples of this project that
look at how did the project connect across fields.
How did it touch on areas that weren't
solely geotechnical engineering
or underground engineering,
or the mechanical engineering,
the tunnel boring machine?
But each one of these is selected to say,
Here's engineering and, engineering plus something.
They can help us see practical
examples what that looks like.
Just a little bit of setting some
maybe more or less familiar with Hampton Roads, Virginia.
That star southeastern corner of
the state is the region we call Hampton Roads.
It's the second largest population center
in Virginia after Northern Virginia,
and a lot of river crossings,
which means heavy traffic congestion.
Every one of those black circles you see on the map is
a tunnel because that region
did a stakeholder influences,
which is the US Navy says there will be
no bridges across the water crossings ships
used to get to the open ocean.
There's a stakeholder constraint that
this region has to have
tunnels for its major river crossings.
Now, why a bridge tunnel?
You may have heard that reference to Hampton Roads.
We all know what a tunnel is.
Enter it on land and you go under water or under a city,
come out on land again.
Why would you need a bridge to be part of that tunnel?
Well, remember the Navy said they didn't
want bridges over their ship channels.
The challenge though is that waterways in Hampton Roads,
a very broad tunneling technology,
especially back in the 50s
was not sufficient to tunnel under
one shoreline from one shoreline
under the channel to get to the other shoreline,
and this map, which gives us an example.
We look at the bathymetry
of the Southeastern Corner of Virginia.
The red and orange and yellow colors are land.
You can recognize the land mass of Southeastern Virginia,
Eastern Shore on the right hand of that picture.
Everything that's blue and green and purple is
water and by the different colors
you can see the depth of the water.
Purple and blue are the deepest water.
Green is the shallowest water,
and this shows you right away that there's
two natural channels coming into the Port of Virginia.
One that goes to the left over
here is the one that comes into the Port of Virginia.
The other channel that goes up
north is the one that goes to Baltham,
we're up the Chesapeake Bay and because
the only place ships need to
cross are those natural channels,
that's the only place the tunnel needs to be.
Back in the 50s, the solution
the engineers came up with to deal with
the Navy constraint was
the Navy doesn't care about the shallow water.
All that green area, light blue.
Navy is never going to sail
ships there because it's so shallow.
We're talking about maybe five feet,
10 feet, possibly 15 feet.
It's not navigable,
hence came the idea of building
a bridge across the shallow water,
a tunnel from Ban Made Islands under those blue channels,
and then bridges again to get back to shore,
and that matched the tunneling technology and
ventilation capabilities of the day.
On the next slide, we're going to zoom into this map,
so you can see a little more practically what that looks
like not only from the Hampton Road Bridge tunnel,
but also for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel.
Notice for instance, here these little red stitches here.
That's that metric signature
of where that bridge tunnel is.
We'll zoom in here, and you can see exactly how both
those bridge tunnels cross over those natural channels.
They came from stakeholder coordination.
We had to find a way to deal with the Navy,
but also with tunnel ventilation technology at the time.
Zooming back out, there's the project location.
But you can see now it's not just crossing the water.
That whole corridor is 10 miles
long because we can't expand simply the water cross.
The cars would have nowhere to go,
so we have to not replace the bridges
and then also build new highway on either side,
scope it out to manage
the congestion project is meant to mitigate.
Construction contracting. How do you have a project?
You can't throw a party if no one comes.
When the project was procured,
these are some dates and
facts of the project when it was awarded.
These are the names of the construction stakeholders
who are currently building the project,
and then also and significant,
we will come back to this later.
This is the funding partner who paid for it.
One of the big challenges with
US infrastructure today is,
where's the money going to come from.
Many of us as engineers focus on
our formulas and our calculations.
But unless there's funding,
our best designs will never be realized.
It's very important Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel expansion
to align the project funding.
Unusually, it's 92% regionally,
that comes from a fuel tax and sales tax that
is paid by 14 cities and counties and Hampton Roads.
In the rest of Virginia, your sales tax is 5.3%,
in Hampton Roads 6%.
That 0.7% difference goes into this transportation fund,
which helps pay for projects like this.
That flag is the regional flag of Hampton Roads,
representing the sea and
the agriculture as well
as the stars from the cities and counties.
You'll see that again. I'll show
a little video here that is before and after.
You'll find it interesting, but that's not
what I want you to take away from it.
This was used to communicate to the public,
one of the important stakeholders
how to grasp what this project was going to be.
As engineers, we look at plans and
blueprints and have a pretty good feel
of what the project is.
The public is not able to read those blueprints,
and if we try to tell them in words,
there's going to be a Marine Trestle Bridge 6,000 feet
long and a twin bow tunnel at 46 feet diameter.
That goes over the public's head.
How do we conceptualize
the project in a way that they can understand it?
That was exactly what this tool was meant to
do and why we developed it as part of the project team.
It's a graphic rendering showing the existing conditions,
and we're going to have a split screen
showing the future on the bottom,
existing conditions on the top.
Notice how the artist put traffic congestion
on top there and free flowing traffic.
Future conditions we're going to make.
We're coming from the north as we saw on the Map there,
coming across the first of
the bridges to come to the Man Made Islands.
One of the things we had to explain to numbing is,
we need to expand the Man Made Island,
have space for the tunnel to go,
and this helped the public see very clearly what all that
work with that island expansion was to be representing.
There's two tunnels representative,
we saw in the diagram here with two lanes each.
Now the public can grasp what this means.
They come out on the South Island.
They come back up on the new Trestle Bridge,
and then they can identify with
the trestle bridges they know today.
There are two lanes in each direction,
and as they see this construction taking place,
now they have a peg to hang it on.
Now they can understand.
This is our project. This is
what our tax dollars are covering.
This is what we'll be able to drive on in the future,
and now they have a sense of ownership and
support that it means something to them
and they can be
more educated participants in the project delivery.
Now moving on then to another type of set of
dots we have to connect across fields, history.
No project happens in a vacuum.
One challenge we realized we had organizationally was,
I made a timeline of when
all the tunnels had been built in Hampton Roads.
You saw that map earlier on with those black circles.
Look how those red dots are
collected on the left hand side of that chart.
There's a huge tunnel building in the 50s and 60s,
and the benefit of that organizationally was,
let's say the builder on one of
those tunnels needed an idea.
He could just call it a friend or
a neighbor or an uncle and say,
how did you solve it when you built the previous one?
Because there was so much organizational
or institutional knowledge in that region.
But as time moved on,
the space between those dots widened
out and that meant by the time we
got to the Hampton Roads Bridge tunnel in the late 2018s.
We had very little recent knowledge.
The Midtown tunnel had just been opened after
about a 20 year delay since the previous tunnel,
but we were much worse off as tunnel builders in 2015,
2016, than fathers and
grandfathers had been for
the first round of tunnel building.
We acknowledged, we realized we had to do
organization capacity rebuilding just
by recognizing history here.
We didn't have all the tools and
experience at our fingertips
that we'd had a generation ago.
What are some of the things that we were able to learn
from looking at the past, looking at history?
Thankfully, some things don't change and
geological sections and profiles and additions.
We were able to use the original borings
from 1950s tunnel and
the 1970s tunnel to help understand what we had
underground while early in
the project development process,
we were taking our own borings.
You don't need to be a geotechnical engineer
to look at this and say,
the difference between what's under the North Island on
the left and the South Island
on the right are very different.
We like to characterize this as
our good island and our bad island.
Anyone who want to guess which Bad Island?
>> South Island. Why is that?
I heard soft plays. That is absolutely right.
The South Island is sitting on top of
a peat marsh which is one
of the most compressible and
worst building soils you can have.
We knew that there was going to be a challenge even
having historical data from
how the previous tunnels were built,
the soil samples we had,
that this was going to be a challenge
working on the South island.
In fact, I've taken excerpt here from one of
the borings from the initial samples we had.
Again, you don't have to be a geotechnical
engineer to know that words
like that means this is not going to
be a great construction soil.
Decayed vegetation, decomposed vegetation,
that's what we had to work with.
We also looked back from history and saw,
how did they solve this in the past?
For the 1950s tunnel,
the first one that was built across the harbor,
they simply excavated that soft organic material
and replaced it with sand.
Presto, problem solved.
In the 1970s, the challenge was doing that was if they
dug out close to the 1950s tunnel,
they would destabilize it by excavating so close by.
What was done instead was they
put in sand drains which are basically
wicks that would allow the water to come
out of the clay and come up through the sand.
To hasten the process, a surcharge mound
was put on top of the island.
Then the consolidation or
settlement was measured until they leveled out
13 feet of settlement through that soil there, very soft.
What we did was we recognized since we were going to have
a tunnel boring machine part of this project,
we knew there would have to be improvements made to keep
the tunnel machine from nose diving,
going off alignment, or even
the finished tunnel from trying to float,
because the soft soils were not
sufficient to hold it down in place.
A cementitious ground improvement is going to be
necessary even at our very early conceptual stages
of understanding what we need to be built.
Let's actually look at a photo of
what this South island looks like.
The existing traffic tunnel
or running diagonally in the picture, this direction.
The new tunnel is going to start in this pit here.
At TBM, a tunnel boring machine
needs to start inside a pit to begin its journey.
That's called the shaft.
One of the first exercises on
the project was to build this shaft
and those soft tools were also
encountered in that shaft construction.
But we were aware of that.
We expected that the contractor had
mitigation measures in place
to build that shaft successfully.
Now we're going to zoom into that shaft and see what it
looks like with the tunnel boring machine in place.
This is an aerial view right from the top.
This is just before the tunnel boring
started in April last year.
The reason that they made the shaft so long
was the TBM came essentially,
think of it as a locomotive if you will,
although it's a different concept.
Then three cars, we call them gantries,
Gantry 1, Gantry 2,
Gantry 3, and
Gantry 4 would eventually
be attached once there was space.
The idea was to make the shaft as long as
possible as to accommodate
as much of the TBM as possible,
so that it can start out on its journey without
having to be assembled subsequently.
But that's what the machine looked like from
the grove. It was 46.
It is 46 feet in diameter which makes
it the second largest TBM in the US,
second only to the machine in Seattle,
finished boring a few years ago.
It is certainly something neat
that we have here in Virginia.
For those of you who weren't able
to take the field trip earlier,
the tunnel boring will be resuming this fall,
going to approximately next summer.
If you have a chance to visit
the project in that span of time,
I would really encourage and recommend
that something that you're unlikely to see frequently.
I mentioned we were going to hear a little bit more about
the TBM and also see that flag again.
Everybody recognize this?
One of the calls I got part
way through the project from the contract.
He said, ''Martha, you need to
tell us how to paint the TBM''.
I said, ''Let me get back to you''.
As an engineer I was puzzled,
because we all know that paint is going
to wear off the first six inches of tunneling.
What's the big deal about having
a special paint job at
the front phase of your cutter head?
Our contractor explained it to me.
Said, ''Martha, when you're
doing a bridge construction project,
the public can watch that bridge be built.
They can follow it. They can appreciate.
They can understand how it's coming together.
With a tunnel, there's nothing for the public to see,
nothing for them to follow.
They have to have a very compelling visual image of what
that TBM looked like before it went
underground and that's the motif,
that's the icon that will stay with them,
long after the machine has disappeared,
there's nothing for them to see day to day.
That's why it's important to have a compelling image''.
It occurred I said, the region has been
critical making this project possibly
with that 92% of project funding.
This would be a very worthy way to
recognize those 14 cities and counties.
Now those of you who are familiar with
Hampton Moods may pick up on this,
but eight of those cities and counties that are
contributing to the project are
below South of the waterway,
six of them are North of the waterway.
See how the stars are laid out.
Really was a very intentional and meaningful nod to
the region who was very grateful and appreciative
that we acknowledge the contributions in this way.
But one of the things that also goes into a TBM project,
because you have to name your machine.
You can't start boring until your machine
has a name and by tradition,
the machine has to have a female name.
How did we find out what that name should be?
We went to school children in the region and said,
we need you to have a competition and come up with
an explanation and nomination of
who the name of our TBM should be,
what the name save ought to be.
School children were very clever.
In one of the local middle schools
they said, ''That movie,
Hidden Figures was based on
engineers and mathematicians who
worked in Hampton, Virginia.
That's the city of the North end of the tunnel''.
We named the TBM Mary,
for Mary Jackson who was one
of the engineers and Hidden figures.
There's tying it all together.
A very regional recognition not only for Motif machine,
but also for its name sake.
Again, this is how we connect with the public.
These were our stakeholders.
We could have just painted a machine
any geometric pattern,
but here was an opportunity to connect with
the community who was paying for the project,
who was helping it happen,
and we were glad to be able to take
advantage of that opportunity.
With that, let's move on to some other things
where we had to connect different fields,
not just stakeholders,
not just military, not just history.
We discovered we had a bird issue.
We saw that picture of the South Island.
That South Island, before we started
the construction project had a lot of open space,
fantastic place for migrating birds to nest,
because there were no predators.
They were not connected to the mainland.
Also, there was a smog's board of fish that
these birds could eat right outside this nesting ground.
We learned also birds are like fish.
They come back to where they hatch.
Every year over the decades since that island was built,
there are more and more of these migratory birds.
Now most of them were seagulls,
but a very small number were threatened species which
meant you couldn't just tell
a bird colony move somewhere else,
we're going to build a TBM launching shaft.
There had to be some thoughtful coordination with
the environmental engineers and
the wildlife biologists to say,
how do we deal humanely with these birds
recognizing we do need to
build this construction project,
but we can't just pave
over this area where these birds were
nesting and leave them on their own to find another home.
Well it turned out that we
had an opportunity to share the space.
That's how congested the South island was and
not only was there no safe space for the birds to nest,
but more importantly also
for the construction operations.
If the birds had laid an egg there,
there would have to be a perimeter set
of all around that egg until it hatched.
Which would mean construction operations
would have to shut down and potentially on
a critical path if an egg were to be laid in
an area that was part of the construction operations.
For the sake of the birds as well as for
the sake of the construction operations,
they really needed a safer space to be able to nest.
Now there was a historical island
up in the upper left of that picture.
It wasn't inhabited, it wasn't
used for much, and someone said,
''Wouldn't it be ideal if we could
somehow encourage this colony of
birds to move over to
that uninhabited island that's historically protected,
where there's no construction,
and then they'll have a safe place.
But there was no precedent in literature,
how you just pick up and move a colony of birds.
We had to coordinate with a number of stakeholders in
different fields and we found
out that there was a solution for this.
Part of it was setting up decoys and bird
calls on that historic island,
but the other one it's our employee of the month
[LAUGHTER] You can hire
trained border collies and
handlers who will help chase birds away humanely.
Border coolies don't eat birds,
but they just have great fun chasing them.
This then it looks like
sheep and they're herding animals.
They love to chase sheep, they'll chase anything.
By having these trained border collies
able to patrol the islands,
but their handlers and encourage the birds not to nest.
The birds quickly got the message that
that other island is a much calmer space.
Sure enough over the course of a couple of years,
the bird colony has been entirely
moved and they're able to nest there safely.
The construction is able to proceed.
If we go back to the picture we had before,
you can see that the space
available on the historic island
isn't quite as large a the space
available on the South island.
That's why during bird season which
is between April and September,
these three barges covered with nesting material,
sand, and gas are also pulled into position.
The birds will use that space as well as a portable nest.
A lot of creativity went into this,
a lot of coordination among
fields that you wouldn't normally think
go together to make this success possible.
Let's look at another discovery
of things we didn't expect.
Any geotechnical construction folks
want to take a guess what this is?
>> Hydromill, this is the machine we
used to build the walls of the shaft.
That was that tri cell shape
that we saw the TBM sitting in.
In order to dig that shaft or constructed,
this machine digs essentially
rectangular holes in the ground.
When you put one rectangular hole next to another,
you can trace out that tri cell shape.
Similar to a drilled shaft,
you can fill that hole with slurry with a resteel cage,
and then with a treme pipe port from
the bottom to the top with concrete,
and then it becomes a concrete wall that then
can be part of holding the shaft in place.
We kept these hydromill trench cutters very
busy digging those deep
rectangular holes to build our shaft.
Now, once in a while, we'd have
a challenge where the hydromill
would get stuck and wouldn't be able to do its job.
When those wheels quit turning,
we'd have to pull it back to the surface and
hose off mud and slurry to see.
What is this thing binding up on, what got it stuck?
One day, this is the image we got and there is
this big metallic chunky thing
stuck in the teeth of the hydromill.
We got where we can take a post or look
at it, spherical metal objects.
Anybody want to hazard to
guess what we're looking at here?
>> Cannonballs.
>> These are cannonballs.
What I learned by talking to
military explosive ordinance disposal specialists
is when your cannonball is small,
say four to five inches in diameter,
the odds are less likely that there's explosive material
inside because just physically four or five inches,
it's less likely to fit.
When your cannonball is nine inches in diameter,
it is very likely to be
a shell that has explosive things there.
This is a live shell, the military EOD
later took it away and blew it up,
and definitely had live material left in it.
We found nine of these in the course of working on
the island. Where did these come from?
How did an island we got in the 50s and expanded the 70s?
We had to dig that history again and see,
where did that sand originally from [inaudible] 1750s.
That sand was hydraulically dredged from
the local area permissible borrow area
[inaudible] to the South island.
This was an area where there were
known military historical fortifications.
It was very logical, very likely it was cannon fire.
Many years, decades,
not centuries in this area
[inaudible] buried the sand permissible borrow area.
Nobody realized that they were picked up
hydraulic in the 50s and the 70s.
Nobody realized they got buried in
the island, but we found them.
We were able to take care of those nine cannonballs,
no harm was done, no one was injured,
and man good friends of our military expose ordinance
exposing frenzy,
but [inaudible] TBM has
to tunnel through the same territory.
What the TBM do?
This was not something that come up with.
TBM usually go through native soil through
[inaudible] it's been adjusted with
[inaudible] been fund rec to figure
out how is our TBM that's already been
manufactured to big respond or behave,
sucks up one of these things in its of head.
We brought first principles,
what we did was we brought together a workshop
on factors, TBM tunneling experts.
We also brought in military
explosive ordinance disposal experts,
we just have to talk to each other.
TBM tunnelers explained,
here's the course where the soil power
will be ticked up and processed through the machine,
and the Navy experts,
the military experts said, well,
based on these types of cannonballs and
the power of explosive ordinance in the 1800s,
here's the explosive power you could expect.
We took them out to a tour of
the TBM that was under assembly at that point.
This is one of the parts of
the TBM we were most concerned about.
That's the jaw crusher,
it's great for rocks.
What if you catch a cannonball in your jaw crusher?
We didn't want to find out.
There we have a military E8 on the right-hand side,
inside our slier fire box,
the draw crusher, looking at the size of the steel,
looking at the dimensions of the machine.
Once he got out of slier fire box, he said,
relative to the explosive power
of what's in a cannonball, he said,
no machine could eat cannonballs for lunch,
but just by being able to bring together or
connect across those very unlikely fields.
Thankfully, to our knowledge,
we didn't pick up any on the way out,
there's still a chance of TBM we'll
have to encounter that area on the way back,
but now we have a path forward.
Discovery Number 3,
anyone want to guess what this looks like? Fossils, yes.
We were looking at the material coming from
the TBM conveyor belt last September,
and somebody said, this doesn't look great.
They hit the emergency stop button,
threw the fragments to a five gallon bucket,
brought them back to the trailer, washed them off.
We had found bones from TBM.
Then we mapped, this is where they were,
they were about 100 feet
underground. What's going on here?
We called the Virginia Museum of Natural Histories,
that's our paleontology, friends.
We sent those samples and said,
what just happened here, what's going on?
Thankfully, if we look back at this collection,
the one on the far right-hand side,
the one you can see with the closest,
right-hand picture is a tooth.
Based on that tooth, the paleontologists
were able to identify
these fragments and determined that this was a mastodon.
Yes, we have mastodons in Virginia.
A surprise to many of us that they
were present up until relatively recent geological time.
That's the one on the right, you can see it's very
close to the size on the left,
close to the size of
the traditional elephant that we recognize on the right.
These are just a few illustrations
of things we probably haven't heard about
Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel project
that required us to connect across fields,
to deal with complexities,
and things that hadn't come up before,
things where there wasn't a cookbook or
a textbook solution to do with this.
To bring it all back together,
those tools are managing complexity.
How do we get some takeaways and
some lessons learned to deal with this?
We'll come back to this picture,
and the things you can see where we talked about
connecting across fields, that's the art.
You can see that all our best geological bowings,
all our best geotechnical engineering,
all our best tunnel design, still science.
Really took that art of connecting
those additional fields to be able to
solve those examples that I showed you a moment ago.
How does one learn to do this?
Does one just concentrate hard
and hope it comes together?
Let me offer some practical tools of how
we can work to build these skill sets and
become increasingly
comfortable with connecting across fields.
First of all, it doesn't come immediately,
it has to take time.
In the academic environment,
we study for several years,
we get a piece of paper at the end.
Here's a diploma, now you have this level of knowledge,
you can check that box.
This skill set isn't like that,
you'll never get a piece of paper,
say you've mastered it.
It's more like a sunset, it comes gradually,
and you get better and better at
it imperceptibly over time.
As you seek out complex projects to work on,
that gives you an opportunity to work with
and for people who have these skills.
You remember my example,
the $22 million diamond interchange,
I got to work for someone who had this skill.
I learned a tremendous amount just by
watching how that individual solves
problems and dealt with challenges
and took apart complexity and made it more manageable.
One thing that's helped me in my
more recent career experience,
as senior people would outline the path forward,
I'd also often be thinking,
here's how I would solve this,
here's what I would say, and increasingly,
as what I had in my mind,
calibrated, with what the senior people were saying,
I got more confidence,
I got a greater voice just to go ahead and say that thing
because of the opportunity to
calibrate people who knew
what they were doing in their field.
Finally, continuing education.
By this, I don't mean professional development hours,
the kind that you get to keep your PE license current.
I don't even mean maybe getting another academic degree,
that continuing education is valuable,
it's good, and you should pursue it,
but continuing education, the sense
of being aware of adjacent fields,
ones that you might not normally think about,
ones that you might not normally look
at as a connective with engineering.
One challenge we do have as
engineers, we're very silent,
we love our field, we're very
proud of it, and that's good and right,
but we should respect a little more the other fields
like paleontology, communications,
business and finance, because you can see how each of
those played into helping make
this project possible and successful.
As we bring this to a close,
I wanted to acknowledge the good conversations I had
with geotechnical engineers at the reception last night.
These are some thoughts I took
away from those conversations.
I wanted to share with the room
for those of you who may not
have been in the conversations we had.
One challenge is, let's say,
as you connect across fields,
you find one that's very interesting to
you and you gravitate toward it.
I grappled with this because my studies
originally were as a structural engineer.
I got an honors undergraduate degree.
I got a very competitive international fellowship
to study structural engineering abroad.
That is my career branched in another direction.
I felt guilty for a while,
I was turning my back on all this investment
in structural engineering,
until I realized I'm not abandoning it.
I'm building on top of it.
It's a foundation that's enabling
me to move forward in my career.
If you went to a similar crossroads and you worry
about do I need to
stay in exactly the thing that you studied?
No, you can build on it.
Your skill set here is to learn how to learn,
and you're putting that to good use by continuing
to expand your education.
Another topic that came up last night
is business education.
Some of you in looking for ways to
connect across fields have raised
questions about engineers and
MBAs. Should you pursue one?
When should you pursue one?
I want to touch here on the when question.
Because often it makes a lot of sense
if you're an engineer getting
a bachelor's and master's degree
to do your engineering degrees back to back.
Makes a lot of sense because the content
has a good touch point and overlap.
With an MBA, I would recommend,
if this is something that appeals to you,
waiting several years after you finish your studies,
getting industry experience, both on the outside,
to get a business degree rather than doing
back-to-back with your initial studies.
Why is that? Because an MBA is
a magnifying glass on the previous experience you gain.
As you have zero experience,
there's nothing to magnify.
You will get a lot
less out of the degree than if you have
several years of work experience
to be able to get the most out of it.
As you hear the course concept, to say,
now I have something in my own
experience, that makes sense.
That course is more logical.
I see the application of that concept.
Then finally, this ties in to
the point about complexity
changing throughout the project.
Some people will start a project and feel duty-bound.
I need to stay on that project until it finishes.
But one principle that I like to remind myself is,
only do what only you can do.
If you've been on a project or
an undertaking for spun of time,
other people can do your job.
Maybe you've trained them how to do it.
Maybe they've built new skills,
and they can do it.
Maybe that's the time to think about doing
something else that only you can
do to give them space
to spread their wings and grow their muscles,
and then give you a chance to do
something that fills a slot that nobody else is filling.
Takeaways, recapping
our three points for the presentation.
We talked about project complexity.
Even though we put zeros on our resume,
I do it, there's nothing wrong with that.
But we have to remember, we shouldn't be
impressed just because we see zeros
that project complexity isn't necessarily
proportional to its cost.
We have to keep in mind the different mindsets.
Remember the slinky of recognizing projects aren't always
proportional to different sizes and levels of challenge.
We talked about illustrations of underground projects,
how that shows us very practical illustrations
for connecting across fields,
how we saw their technical solutions and
non-technical solutions for helping
carry that project forward.
Finally, we talked about tools for managing complexity.
We like to label our college degrees and
put them in boxes and say I've achieved this,
and I'm an expert in that.
It's a fantastic starting point.
That's the gray bar that we saw in a diagram earlier.
You have to have the science to build
anything to do in but it's not
enough to gain that increase in those other fields.
Any record. Happy to take any questions.
>> I'd like to
point out that only do what only you can
do best to work yourself out of a job.
Find somebody else. Train him. Any questions.
>> This is like a management question,
but it is a technical question
regarding what makes you assign
that tri-cell design for the tunneling of the key shaft?
>> Because we didn't need struts.
When you do a rectangular shaft,
struts all over that make it very
difficult to move materials in and out,
as well as to move anything vertically.
With the. What design, you need to instruct
only two struts and the touching points
of the surface of?
I think [inaudible].
>> Questions about cannonballs? Yes.
>> I want to know the current progress of the project.
What stage of the project right now?
>> Certainly. The TBM
has the first tunnel from the South Island to the north.
That's about an 8,000-foot journey,
which roughly a year came out in April 2024.
Contractors are currently disassembling
and reassembling the TBM.
The shield of this fork's plan
now is starting south this fall,
starting at the Northland,
then continuing to the South
Island numbers of approximation.
That journey should complete summer of fall 2025.
That won't be the end of the project;
that exactly would show up.
There's a lot of fit-out that has to be done,
not just building during that time of year,
but also the electrical, mechanical systems,
communications, fire suppression,
as well as finishing the land sign.
The current completion date for
the project will be approximately spring 2027.
Time traffic, sorry,
they're getting a bridge.
All the bridges, so those of you who
have driven I-64 Camas,
the bridges you have driven on will be replaced at
their bridges will be
demolished, replaced with structures.
The tunnel stays the existing tel change bridges.
What made you decide to get your PhD?
I can imagine that must be a tough decision.
A lot of thought went into it.
I'll give you a few of the ingredients that one
was I had already gotten my master's degree early one.
That was the next question: should I go further?
The way that came about, remember
that bridge at Charleston I showed earlier.
That was a pivotal project,
accurately 20 years in to get.
[inaudible] Let me my attention because I like
big infrastructure to happen and to realize that money
is a holdup to necessary infrastructure
coming into existence,
not so much the technical things
that I had studied at school,
made me want to learn more about business.
But then the other thing in parallel was that I had done
some adjunct teaching at a college around that time.
I got feedback that you should consider teaching.
You have some skills here. I said, well,
maybe if I want to learn more about the subject area,
and then have the ability to teach
professionally in the future, I can combine these two,
and a PhD will be the right way to do it.
Yes.
>> [inaudible].
>> With the project or with the career
[LAUGHTER] I wish I had realized these things sooner.
I fretted and worried and chafed far too
much and for us to realize that there
is these ingredients that we can
explore and lean on and have
a bit more peace and certainty and
not have to worry so
frequently because most of us worry about our careers.
What will I do next? What will I do now?
Just realizing there's tools in
the tool to consult wise people
around us to consult people and have
a little bit more experience and recognize.
This happens to everyone, I don't
need to fret and chafe about it.
If I could rewind,
I wouldn't have worried quite as much.
>> Your new roles. What do things you need to do?
What's your greatest challenge looking forward to.
>> A little bit of context is in my new role
working on major projects
for Maryland Transit Administration.
I've now moved into light rail.
This is a new technical specialty for me.
Previously, I've worked with highways and tunnels.
The nomenclature and technical challenges of light rail.
Yes, I'm coming up to speed on,
but those aren't the primary challenges
project planning challenges.
In
so
many layers
of things science.
How do we take accidents?
How do we help the State the official financial support
bring those cases together.
This is a great example of connecting in
frost feel for decades,
engineers who focus on.
How do I build it or how do I build it a cheaply?
Recognizing that suability I
give you an illustration for Bridget.
Existing trestle bridge,
very low and close to the surface.
The bridge be higher average higher than it.
Also be a couple of higher up in salt?
Designed these for 100 years
two
steps ridge.
Sometimes the existing bridge so much.
>> The driver for
how much voice did we have assistant?
[inaudible].
>> Very good point, stainless re additional rev.
This came about with it started with the agency.
Virginia department of transportation,
but with influences from the engineers in house,
as well as consult engineers who advised the agency.
There is a voice for engineers to
be able to give technical advice.
Here's the state of the art.
Here are the best practices coming down the page.
Then owners have expertise available,
say when next project comes along.
Here's ways now that we can implement
these best practices
that the technical experts have brought to our view.
>> [inaudible]
>> One way that we did this was
very important scale requirement to co
locate the teams on
smaller or less complex construction projects.
The contractor will have a field office,
the designer will be maybe the designers office.
The owner will be sitting in the headquarters,
but on this project, we said there's going to be
so much need for close communication.
We made a requirement to have the cont design builder.
The owner's personnel and
the contractor's designer physically in the same space.
That communication we just
walk down the hall and chat with
somebody versus risking misunderstanding
because we waited until a meeting,
or we sent something by e mail that perhaps
wasn't construed as intended.
That's one practical example of how
the collaboration is being realized.
>> Coated staff during
the big project is becoming more popular and it requires
some promise on everybody's part get to go to
the same office every day
and work on some of these challenging projects.
>> That's a good point because it's important for
co located that project.
Staff is in the office five days.
Some of their parent company five days agree.
That cultural detention almost
for people who used to work
construction prosecuted higher value even flexibility.
>> Thank you for coming and giving the talk.
I won't be jealous or anything,
but we were excited to find to find
some rota bones in our offshore cores?
We did not find any mess on teas,
so a bit jealous there,
but I guess the question I had was you talked about
learning these skills and it
goes beyond college education.
As a professor, I got to
think we talked a lot about getting
these technical baselines and technical knowledge,
but I think a lot of students still hear about
stakeholders or public engagemental senior design class.
Is there some fundamental building blocks that we should
be looking at as we look at education as a whole,
and not just save that until you get to
the vary in or you get out into industry?
>> That's part of what lectures like this are for.
You're doing exactly the right thing to concentrate on
that because you have limited space
curriculum fit those things in.
Looking for the opportunities around the edges, capstone,
but also visiting speakers, trips,
opportunities for students to
open up some of these horizons.
Parallel to [inaudible] the extent
you plant those seeds or bring up those examples.
To the extent that could be enriched
[inaudible] voices stat judicial.
>> I got time here,
but I do have a couple of things for you.
I first want to make sure that
as you're riding around the Maryland Transit and near
University of Maryland clear much.
[inaudible] Is appreciation for
presenting this and being a part of the Al family.
Thank you very much, reminder of the.