Emily Luksich
Green & Gold Aide, 2024
As part of the district team for VA-02, Emily visited the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel Expansion Project with her office. The Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel Expansion is the largest highway construction project in Virginia’s history. This transformative undertaking will widen the current four-lane segments along nearly ten miles of the I-64 corridor in Norfolk and Hampton, with new twin tunnels across the harbor. The expansion will increase capacity, ease major congestion, and enhance travel time reliability. Including the construction contract and owner’s costs, the project’s total budget is over $3.9 billion, making it one of the largest infrastructure projects in the country and the largest in Virginia history.
“We also had the opportunity to see “Mary”, the state-of-art $70 million tunnel boring machine used to build these new tunnels, up close and personal. She is an impressive piece of technology that makes large projects like this one efficient and effective. Mary is named after Mary Jackson, a NASA engineer and mathematician who was a pioneer in science and engineering for African American women. The TBM or “Mary” launched from the South Island (Norfolk side) in April 2023, and tunneled at a rate of about 50 feet per day. It is boring down to the layer of soil known as the Yorktown layer, approximately 50 feet below the current tunnels. In total, the tunnels go 173 feet below the water’s surface. This piece of machinery was built specifically for the geological challenges of this area of the harbor. The TBM excavates the tunnels with a circular cross-section through the soil. The existing ten tunnels in Hampton Roads are immersed tubes. Advances in tunnel technology make the bored-tunnel approach desirable for the expansion project.”
