Removing old junk for the new tunnel
Dredging up 500 wood piles is expected to cost $88 million
By: Colleen Wilson
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey
..... About 500 piles left over from a 19th-century pier will be removed from the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan to make way for a new rail tunnel between North Jersey and Manhattan's Penn Station.
.....
Weeks Marine, a company with a contract previously approved by the Gateway Development Commission, will preform the work, which was approved July 8 [2026] by the board of the bistate agency overseeing the $16 billion tunnel project.
..... The full 10-part project will unilaterally include constructing a new two-track rail tunnel and then repairing the old one currently in use by NJ Transit and Amtrak.
..... The pile-removing portion is estimated to cost $88 million and was approved as a change order.
..... The Gateway commission staff estimated the construction, contingency and other costs to total $105.7 million.
..... Since the design phase of the program, one of the biggest challenges anticipated by the Gateway commission is tunneling through the edge of Manhattan, where land-fill was sued to extend the island and timbers were sued to support a historic bulkhead.
.....
Obstructions, such as piles or other debris left behind in an unknown landfill, could prove to be problems for the tunnel boring machines, which perform best when digging through predictable materials like rock or soil.
..... Already, workers have uncovered remnants form an old soap factory and a pig bone.
.....
Pier 68 was built as a freight pier in the 1800s for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. the pier was damaged by a fire in 1964 and then demolished. Left behind were 50-foot-long piles, some made form tree trunks, that remain in the riverbed where the future rail tunnel will be built.
..... "In all of my years of project management, one of the central themes is identification of risks that you will foresee, mitigating those risks, and taking actions to make sure you've done as many of the mitigations as possible," said Thomas Prendergast, the Gateway commission's CEO and an engineer by trade.
..... Weeks Marine, a Cranford-based company, has spent the past two years working on a $284 million portion of the project known as "Hudson Rive Ground Stabilization," which involves building a cofferdam in the middle of the river to calm the waters in the construction area.
..... Within that area - the span of four football fields - workers are adding a mixture of soil, concrete and water to strengthen the riverbed. where it is nearest the surface of the water, the soil is softest and poses possible detriments to the tunnel boring machines.
.....
The cofferdam is supposed to be completed in September 2027.
..... After consulting with outside experts, assessing multiple options and having Weeks Marine perform a test project in 2025 that involved removing some piles form the Pier 68 area, the Gateway commission decided to extend the Cranford company's ground stabilization contract to include this pile-removal work.
..... James Starace, chief of program delivery for the Gateway program, said extending Weeks Marine's contract was the "most efficient and cost-effective approach," adding that the company "is already mobilized in the Hudson River, has specialized marine construction experience and has direct experience with this work."
..... The work will include:
* Extending the cofferdam 265 feet.
* Performing a riverbed survey to locate piles.
* Removing the submerged piles.
* Strengthening the riverbed with grouting.