T unneling

north american
Oct/Nov 2013 www.tunnellingjournal.com

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BUILDING BILLY BISHOP

SEE PAGE 5 NEW IRVINGTON COMPLETES
LAKE MEADS $12M CHANGE ORDER AND OTHER NEWS FROM NORTH AMERICA

TORONTO CITY AIRPORTS PASSENGER TUNNEL PROVIDES A CHALLENGE

SEE PAGE 8 INVESTIGATING SEATTLE SOILS

DETAILS ON PAGES 24-26

CONSTRUCTION OF NEW YORKS NORTHERN BLVD CROSSING

A LOOK AT THE SR 99 TUNNELS GROUND INVESTIGATION AND TESTING PROGRAM

ESAS SEM CHALLENGE

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Vital circles
There is a daunting web site on the Internet that displays the worlds population in real time. As you watch, the sites homepage rapidly clocks up the number of people that have been born, and have died, that day as well as providing a running population growth figure. Stare at the screen for a few minutes and it starts to become a bit overwhelming (the worlds population has grown by 18,000 in the last hour and a half). Did you know that in 1970 there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are today? Population growth rates have begun to decline slightly, but current predictions still indicate that the worlds cities will need to accommodate more than six billion people by 2050 thats almost the entire population of the world today. Behind China and India, the US is the third most populated country in the world, and without a more positive attitude towards increased infrastructure investment in combination with sustainable urban planning and the increased use of underground space the nations cities are almost certainly going to grind to a crumbling halt. Canada and Mexico are faced with the same issues in their major cities. And all this becomes particularly frightening food for thought when put in the context of how much time it takes to bring a major infrastructure project to fruition. Many of North Americas current underground infrastructure projects have been in the planning for more than several decades. As Goodfellow illustrates in this months Insider column (p18), infrastructure investment creates virtuous circles of growth in our cities. Id take that one step further, and say that those circles are vital. Amanda Foley

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North American News Project, contract & company news Characterizing Seattles Soils Several years were spent on an extensive exploration and testing program in order to characterize ground conditions for the SR 99 Tunnel Project (Alaskan Way) alignment Cutting Edge 2013 The full program for this years Cutting Edge Conference on Megaprojects is revealed The Insider Goodfellow looks at the virtuous circle of benefits that can arise from long-term investment in public infrastructure

Right: Site investigation under way in Seattle for the SR 99 Tunnel Project (p8) Below: SEM excavation of East Side Access Northern Blvd Crossing, in Queens, NY (p24)

Front cover:
In March 2012, construction began on a unique 614ft (187m) long underwater pedestrian tunnel that will form a link from Torontos mainland to the island home of the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport, in Ontario, Canada. The tunnel is an unusual project that has set new records for the area. At 10m (32ft) wide and 8m (26ft) high, the Billy Bishop tunnel is by far the largest to have been built in the regions Georgian Bay shale. To facilitate this, seven 1.85m (6ft) interlocking horizontal drift tunnels were excavated using Technicore microtunneling machines, and backfilled with concrete, to create a protective arch under which excavation could proceed. The CA$82.5 million project is being delivered on behalf of the Toronto Port Authority via a publicprivate-partnership (PPP) model. Concessionaire Forum Equity Partners comprises: PCL Constructors (Design-Builder), Johnson Controls (Facility Manager), Technicore Underground (Tunnel Contractor); Arup (Lead Designer), ZAS (Architect), and Exp (Geotechnical Engineer).

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Building the Breakthrough to Billy Bishop A series of interlocking horizontal tunnel drifts, backfilled with concrete, have been used as pre-support to safely excavate Toronto City Airports new passenger tunnel ESAs SEM Challenge The short 125ft (38m) section of SEM tunnel under the Northern Boulevard, in Queens, has the accolade of being one of the most technically challenging elements of New Yorks massive East Side Access Project

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The Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport tunnel in Toronto, Canada, is just 187m (614ft) long, but has required nine TBM drives to build it. Kristina Smith recently caught up with the projects participants to find out why

Building the breakthrough

STANDING AT THE ENTRANCE to the partially-constructed Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport tunnel in Toronto, you could almost imagine yourself to be staring into the remains of a temple, built by some ancient civilisation. Above, a fluted arch formed by interlocking drift tunnels filled with concrete and to either side, walls of layered shale, looking like rows of fine brickwork. When complete, this 614ft (187m) long tunnel will form a link from the mainland to the island home of the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport. Though a tiny player on the world tunneling stage, this is an unusual project that has set new records for this area and geology. A job like this is very unique, says Tony DiMillo, CEO of Technicore Underground who is building the tunnel. It presented many challenges from the engineering design to the actual construction. Lake Ontario is a mere 6m (20ft) from the mainland shaft, and only 10m (33ft) above the top most drift. The shape of the main tunnel is very unique and complex. And all this construction is also adjacent to existing structures which continually remained in operation. The reason for the tunnels unusual interlocking-drift arch is that it must cope with the Georgian Bay shale through which it passes. Excavate a hole in this layered shale, and the walls will begin to move slowly in on you, due to the combined effect of the rock being horizontally stressed due to tectonic activity, and the fact that it takes in water from the air over time and swells (see box, page 21). Though plenty of tunnels have been excavated through this shale, they have all been relatively small in diameter, mostly watermains and sewage tunnels of 4m (13ft) diameter or less. At 10m (32ft) wide and 8m (26ft) high, the Billy Bishop tunnel is by far the largest ever to be built in these ground conditions. Theres a rule of thumb in Toronto that says you must either wait three months between excavating and lining a tunnel to allow for movement or you must install a compressible layer between the rock and the lining. This tunnel is significantly larger than

TO BILLY BISHOP

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Figure 1: Longitudinal section of the Billy Bishop Airport Passenger Tunnel
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Figure 2: Section of the tunnel showing drift arch

Tunnel drifts filled with concrete 5 3 7 Tunnel lining 1 4 2 6 Sleeves cast into concrete for City Mains

Travelators

Walkway Invert Slab

Travelators

Temporary support in one of the drifts prior to backfilling

anything thats been done locally, says Jon Hurt, Tunnel Practice Leader for Arup who designed the tunnel. No one knew how rule of thumb would translate with the increase in size. The Geotechnical Baseline Report (GBR) took a conservative view of the potential swelling, predicting maximum movements due to swell of up to 200mm in the tunnels. The arch solution for the Billy Bishop tunnel, though it has been used before, is unusual. Seven 1.85m (6ft) interlocking horizontal drift tunnels, excavated using mini TBMs and backfilled with concrete, create an arch very much like a secant pile wall on its side. The conditions which require this solution dont come together very often, says Hurt. The short length of the Billy Bishop tunnel meant using a conventional TBM would have been far too expensive. An alternative solution would have been to use SEM, using a series of headings and gradually building up to the final diameter. SEM would have worked well, although it would have required plenty of advanced grouting if water bearing features were encountered, says Hurt. More ground investigation would also have been needed, involving very long, horizontal boreholes to check whether any vertical joints crossed the line of the tunnel. Ultimately it was the contractors decision in terms of the risk he wanted to take, says Hurt. The concern is that if you hit some kind of fault or feature that lets in water, in an SEM heading, you dont really have any fallback. You can probe and grout in advance to try and avoid this, but the mini TBM solution was felt to be safer. Of the three consortiums shortlisted for the delivery and operation of the Billy Bishop

tunnel, only the winning one proposed this design. Forum Infrastructure Partners was the only one to submit the unique tunnel construction method utilizing the overhead arch, says Toronto Port Authority Director of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment, Ken Lundy. The arch prevents water egress and provides an additional layer of stability. A long time coming Anyone using the Billy Bishop airport today must take a ferry from the mainland. The crossing, though only 120m in width, is an inconvenience for the passengers who use the airport each year; 2.3 million of them in 2012. Once the new tunnel is in operation in the Fall of 2014, there will be no need to wait for the ferry which has a capacity of 200 people, although it will continue to run for those who prefer it, and to carry vehicles across. And the constant flow of passengers through the

tunnel rather than four ferry loads per hour should mean less queuing at check-in. The original plans for the airport, named after Canadian first world war flying hero William Avery Billy Bishop, were drawn up in the 1930s and included a tunnel to connect it to the mainland. Due to political changes and wrangling, the tunnel was not constructed. Since then, there have been various plans to create links either underground or by bridge, including a 2002 scheme to create a lift bridge, but none of these came to fruition. Toronto Port Authority finally got this scheme off the ground by procuring the tunnel using a deal fashioned on a public private partnership (PPP) format. Every passenger arriving at the airport pays a $20 airport improvement fee and part of this will go to pay back the CA$82.5 million construction costs over a period of 20 years. The authority signed the deal with

Artists impression of the Billy Bishop Airport Tunnel

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concessionaire Forum Equity Partners in November 2011. Members of the consortium are PCL Constructors, Johnson Controls, Technicore Underground, Arup, architect ZAS and geotechnical engineer Exp. Passengers travelling to the airport will access the tunnel via elevators inside a pavilion building on the mainland, travelling through the tunnel on moving walkways, two in each direction. At the other end, escalators housed inside an extension to the existing airport building will take passengers to ground level. For Hurt and his team, one of the biggest challenges is achieving an airport standard environment inside the tunnel. That means very tight controls on temperature, humidity, ventilation and lighting, says Hurt. Some of the site layouts were very constrained: we could not create lots of space for the ventilation so we had to work hard to fit it in with the help of a 3D BIM (building information modelling) model. Construction began in April 2012, with installation of the secant pile walls for the 33m long x 13m wide x 35m deep (108ft x 43ft x 115ft) mainland shaft, followed by its excavation. Every third pile is reinforced with a steel I-section, and the shaft is temporarily braced at water level and permanently anchored into the shale, which starts 30ft (9m) below surface under a layer of sandy fill. Piling for the island shaft began in June 2012. At 30m (98ft) deep, 5m (16ft) higher than its counterpart across the channel, which means there is an upward gradient on the tunnel from mainland to island side, achieved with a 1% grade for the first half of the tunnel and then a 4% grade on the second half. It is the mainland shaft that has presented Technicore with the most challenges on the project to date, says Michael MacFarlane, Technicore Project Engineer. This is perhaps not surprising when considering the shafts position, wedged up against the historic quay wall of Lake Ontarios Western Channel. South wall movement in the mainland shaft, the side adjacent to the lake, required an additional row of walers and struts, says MacFarlane. Movements of the quay wall and the secant pile walls have been closely monitored during the construction period. According to Andrew Cushing, Senior Engineer for Arup, the top of the quay wall moved 20mm (0.7in) towards the channel during pile installation and then back around 5mm (0.19in) during the excavation of the sandy overburden, without suffering any damage. Further complications for Technicore came due to rock fractures in the mainland shaft. These allowed water to seep into the shaft, which in the winter months led to large chunks of ice forming. The behavior of the shale in the shaft has provided useful information for the design team. One of the big design challenges was gathering enough information about the ground within the confines of a design-and-

How to design in swelling shale

Andrew Cushing, Senior Engineer, Arup
The Georgian Bay Formation, in which the Billy Bishop Airport Pedestrian Tunnel is being constructed, is characteristic of the Greater Toronto Area. It is comprised primarily of low strength, horizontally-bedded shale with intermittent hard sandstone and limestone layers. The shale presents several challenges for the design and construction of a tunnel, beginning with how to model the behavior of the shale. In order to get the most cost-effective design, we developed a numerical model, which is less conservative than the traditionally used closed form solution. The horizontal bedding of the Georgian Bay shale, combined with a high in-situ horizontal stress state, has been known to result in roof stability problems upon excavation of the full tunnel profile. Consideration of this factor resulted in the selection of the rather novel temporary tunnel crown pre-support system involving the seven 1.85m (5ft) diameter horizontal secant drift bores (figure 2). Use of this pre-support procedure eliminated the need to install rock bolts within the crown of the tunnel, thereby reducing the risk of groundwater inflows. The shale is also subject to time dependent deformation, or swelling, as a consequence of the large stress relief that occurs upon excavation in combination with a differential gradient in salinity between the saline rock porewater and freshwater from percolating groundwater or even humid air. The shale was formed in saline conditions. Osmotic and diffusive processes result in a decrease in the salinity of the rock porewater achieved by an overall increase in the water content, resulting in volumetric expansion of the shale rock over time. The development of this timedependent swelling relative to the time of installation of the permanent lining has a direct impact on the long-term moments and forces induced on the lining. A series of laboratory swelling tests on shale samples, along with in-situ rock stress measurements, were obtained and used in the engineering analysis of the tunnel lining. Initially, an analytical closed-form solution was used to evaluate the interaction between the swelling rock and the tunnel lining and quantify the final lining moments and forces. Developed by Lo and Yuen (1981), this solution treats the rock as a viscoelastic material using the Kelvin-Voigt model. However, closed-form solutions do not consider the effect of stresses caused by the time-dependent swelling on the swelling potential of the shale rock. Nor do they take into account other stresses present that have also been shown to impact on the amount of swelling that takes place. The closed form-solution also assumes that the tunnel has a circular cross section, which the Billy Bishop does not. As a result of these factors, the closed-form solutions for the final unlined rock swelling displacement and lining moments and forces are conservatively over-estimated. To obtain a more realistic estimate of these values, a numerical module to account for swelling was developed by Itasca on behalf of Arup and implemented in the FLAC 2D finite difference program. The final lining design was based on numerical analyses using FLAC 2D and UDEC software. Measurements taken during construction are being used to validate the design. Construction monitoring consists of horizontal movement profiles of the tunnel shaft walls from inclinometer readings, along with tunnel movement measurements obtained from optical survey of prism points, multi-point borehole extensometers installed horizontally in the tunnel sidewalls, and measurements of horizontal convergence using a mechanical tape extensometer. For tunnel design, the choice between using the numerical model or closed-form solutions depends on the nature of the project, the completeness of the rock parameters available, the geological conditions, and the stage of design. It would be expedient to use the closed-form solutions for preliminary design consideration and the numerical method to examine the selected sections to finalize the design. For underground structures in highly swelling rocks, the numerical model could lead to significantly more cost-effective designs.

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build program. Tests have to run for 100 days so to take that into the design schedule was hard, says Hurt. Additional tests with geotechnical consultant Exp and the University of West Ontario measured the swelling potential of the ground and gave Arup a more defined range of parameters. We came up with a flexible design that had elements of the observational approach says Hurt. This meant we could monitor what happened during construction in terms of the movements and make adjustments to the reinforcement in the tunnel walls as construction went on. The potentially huge movements referenced in the GBR have not materialized on site shaft walls have moved by tens of millimetres due to the behavior of the shale rather than hundreds, says Hurt, with movement now slowing to the order of 1mm per month. Tunnelling begins Technicore started excavation of the first of the drift tunnels in December 2012. Manufactured by Technicore at its headquarters in Newmarket, Ontario, the two microtunnel machines, named Chip and Dale, weigh in at 198,416 pounds (90 tonnes), are 10m (36ft) long and cost CA$2 million each. Its quite an investment to build them, but they will always be busy, says DiMillo. Those two machines have both dug other tunnels since the drifts were completed. Theres a real demand for small machines of that capacity. These are the smallest machines that Technicore, which specializes in smalldiameter TBMs, would build. Able to operate in soft or hard ground or in EPB mode, they are very versatile, says DiMillo. Operated by one person, the TBMs excavate using a combination of disc cutters and rippers on their heads. Spoil is transferred by screw conveyor to the tail can, with muck cars used at Billy Bishop to transport it to the shaft where it was craned to the surface. The TBMs push themselves forward using a gripper can with spikes that expand into the shale.
View of the mainland shaft and the sea wall

Technicore drilled primary tunnels first, every other one, followed by the secondary or interlocking ones; the first broke through in February 2013, with the final drift completed in April 2013. The design allowed for the sequence of construction to be varied, depending on what worked best for the contractor. Technicore used sea-cans, or containers, to raise the TBMs up to the right height for launch for the higher drifts. All the drifts had to be temporarily supported. The shale in the drifts turned out to be of good quality, allowing the use of plywood bolted to the tunnel crown supported by circular steel ribs as protection for the workers. Once each drift was dug, it had to be backfilled with around 500m3 (655yd3) of concrete. Technicore removed the steel ribs before concreting, leaving the bolts and timber lagging in place. Getting the concrete right for the backfilling operations was a tough technical challenge for Technicore for several reasons. It had to be pumped uphill; be poured continuously to eliminate cold joints; and to achieve a strength of 15MPa within 28 days, but not to reach so high a strength that the TBM could not cut through to create the interlocking drift. This required a special mix design to be able to flow that far and to stay liquid over the duration of the pour, says MacFarlane. And the challenge is to get that flowability without having a high cement content that would mean high strength. It was a balancing act between flowability and strength. Technicore worked with additive supplier BASF and sister company TecMix, which supplied the concrete, to perfect the concrete design. A mobile concrete batching plant on site produced concrete which was pumped down the shaft to a second pump situated at the level of the drift tunnel. The longest pour took 14 hours, the last one nine hours. Three of the drift tunnels contain sleeves cast into the concrete, which will house a water main and two sewer mains. This was an innovation proposed during the procurement process, says Hurt. As we had these drifts as part of our scheme, it was relatively easy to fit the pipes into the structure. The solution has saved the City of Toronto an estimated CA$10 million compared to using a long directional drill below the tunnel. Once the arch of drift tunnels was in place, Chip and Dale then drilled two pilot tunnels to aid with the breaking out the main tunnel. And between July and August 2013, Technicore took out a big central cut, 7m (23ft) wide and 6m (20ft) high. That

One of the micro TBMs is retrieved

was carried out under the protection of the arch canopy and needed very little in the way of support, says Hurt. During September and part of October, Technicore used a Dosco roadheader to take off the bulk of the rock from the sidewalls and then a smaller roadheader to do the fine trimming. A hanging template helped get the profile of the walls right. As the side walls progressed, Technicore installed 3.5m (11.5ft) long dowels and friction bolts, followed by 50mm (1.9in) of shotcrete reinforced with polypropylene fibres. The next step will be to cut out the invert followed by waterproofing, using PVC sheeting. Technicore will concrete the invert first, which will contain drainage runs and electrical conduits. And then the arch will be cast in place. The original design set a 150 day gap between the primary and secondary lining to allow the rock to swell. However, that requirement has been revised, says MacFarlane: Since the swell has been considerably less than anticipated, the elapsed days has been reduced to 120 and will be further reduced to 90 days. However, to accommodate the remaining potential swell, the amount of reinforcing has been increased in the sidewalls compared with the 120 days exposure for the 90 days pour. Once the tunnel structure is complete, the fit-out will begin, and the buildings above each shaft can start to take shape. The original plan had been to open the tunnel for passengers by April 2014, but that date is now expected to be early September. Though only a short section of tunnel, the number of steps required in the construction of the Billy Bishop Tunnel and the intensity of work employed has been immense. Technicore has been working 24 hours a day, through both the TBM and conventional mining operations since December 2012. One thing about unusual projects is that they can be very difficult to schedule. This is something we have never done before, says DiMillo. Would Technicore do anything differently if it was starting over? DiMillo is emphatic: Not a thing.

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