Bath Iron Works Land Level Transfer Facility

Design-Builder: Clark Group, Bethesda, Md., owner of Guy F. Atkinson Construction Co., Lakewood, Colo.

Engineer: Moffatt & Nichol Engineers, Raleigh, N.C.

Engineering subconsultant and precast engineer: Berger/ABAM Engineers, Federal Way, Wash., an affiliate of Louis Berger & Assoc. Inc.

Owner: General Dynamics-Bath Iron Works, Bath, Maine

Precaster for piles: Northeast Concrete Products LLC, Plainville, Mass.

Precaster for pile caps and slabs: Bayshore Concrete Product Corp. Inc., Cape Charles, Va.

Precaster for utility tunnels and beams: Oldcastle Precast/Rotondo Precast, Rehoboth, Mass.

Subcontractor for drilling, pile installation: Guy F. Atkinson Construction, Lakewood, Co.

It’s a gargantuan structure. Located on the Kennebec River in Bath, Maine, the facility is known as a Land Level Transfer Facility (LLTF). But behind the big name is a 15-acre, high-performance concrete platform upon which its owner, General Dynamics, will build ships for the U.S. Navy using the latest innovations in ship-building technology. From the LLTF, ships can be moved to a floating dry dock for launch. Nine acres of the gigantic deck are built on a retained fill structure, while the remaining six acres extend over water and were constructed primarily with a precast concrete system supported by 1,350 precast concrete piles. Land and waterside portions support four 300-ton gantry craneways that serve three shipways and one outfitting pier. Originally, the over-water platform was designed “with a lot of cast-in-place concrete and steel-pipe piles,” says V.K. Kumar, vice president with Berger/ABAM, the project’s engineering consultant. “Some project managers with Guy F. Atkinson [owned by Clark Group, the project’s design-builder] came to us before the job was bid, and they wanted us to value-engineer the design. Our first thought was, why don’t we use precast concrete piles?

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Precast Piles, Deck Create Shipbuilding Platform
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