Audacious engineering paved the way for 1964 opening of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge

Daily Press Archive / Daily Press

Almost all of the 2,000 workers employed on the CBBT were ferried to the work site by a fleet of crew boats based at Little Creek.

Courtesy of the Acme Photo Company / Daily Press

Floating cranes and barges laden with stone build the breakwater around an artificial island while construction crews begin work on the entrance to a tunnel. The form of a buried tunnel section can be seen emerging from the front of the island.

Daily Press archive/Jim Livengood / Daily Press

This Daily Press archive photo from March 29, 1963 shows part of the fleet of floating cranes, barges, tugboats and crew boats needed to construct the crossing over the depths of the bay.

Daily Press archive

This June 28, 1961 shows the work on progress on one of the entrances to the crossing's tunnels.

Daily Press archive / Daily Press

This Daily Press archive photo shows the twin islands of the Baltimore Channel tunnel still under construction with the Eastern Shore in the distance.

Courtesy Acme Photo Company, Inc. / Daily Press

Designed and fabricated in Hampton Roads, the Two-Headed Monster followed behind Big D, cutting the pilings to height with its front crane and capping them together with the crane at its rear. Detachable rollers enabled the 177-foot-long truss bridge to move from trestle to trestle.

Fifty years after mesmerized motorists made their first wide-eyed trip across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel on April 15, 1964, the seemingly endless, 17.6-mile expanse of elevated trestles, high-level bridges and underwater tunnels once hailed as an engineering wonder has lost a little luster.

In Hampton Roads alone, four more immense tubes have been sunken under the waterways to build new crossings or expand old ones, giving this part of Virginia one of the world's biggest collections of subterranean crossings and making the once spectacular idea of driving under a river or bay almost common.

But when engineers began plotting their course on the edge of the Atlantic in 1958, no one had ever attempted to build such a long and challenging passage in such a daunting location.

Seven workers died in the audacious $200 million gamble. And when it stumbled over such obstacles as a prehistoric peat bog hidden 70 feet below the bottom or the punishing waves of the March 1962 Ash Wednesday storm, more than one observer wondered if the immense enterprise was just too big and daring to finish.

"It was a very high-risk job from the beginning because of the exposure to the sea conditions. Some people said it couldn't be built," says John W. Fowler, who was 33 when he became project engineer for Norfolk's Tidewater Construction Corp. and two of the four other contractors who handled the project.

"But we started planning early. We learned as we went along — and we found a way to get it done. Nobody had ever seen some of the giant machines we devised to do this job."

Rough waters

The north-south crossing between Cape Charles on the Eastern Shore and Little Creek in Norfolk was not the only route considered after the Chesapeake Bay Ferry Commission — which had been organized partly at the suggestion of Peninsula interests — won the authority to construct a fixed crossing in 1956.

Made up of members from Hampton, Newport News and Warwick as well as South Hampton Roads, the group also explored an 18.9-mile east-west route that would have connected Cape Charles with a spot just north of Buckroe Beach in Hampton.

But despite its significantly lower construction cost and cheaper maintenance expenses, the Hampton option lost out to the north-south crossing, which studies predicted would generate as much as 50 percent more traffic and $250 million more in tolls over 35 years.

"I think it's a big mistake," state Sen. W. Marvin Minter of Mathews told the Daily Press, after a 7-3 vote that frustrated not just the Peninsula and Middle Peninsula but also Charlottesville and Richmond.

Still, one day after the State Highway Commission endorsed the decision on Oct. 25, 1957, ferry commission member J. Clyde Morris — whose job as Warwick city manager was ending because of consolidation with Newport News — became the project's executive director.

Among his first acts was signing a contract for test borings of the bottom along the newly approved route.

Overseeing the work for Sverdrup & Parcel — the internationally known St. Louis engineering firm that designed and managed the construction of the crossing — was Norfolk native Bill Craft, who’d graduated from Virginia Tech in 1955.

Later the deputy director of the Peninsula Ports Authority, Craft watched a tough winter unfold as engineers probed the underlying soil.

"There’d been a long bridge like this built over Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. But nothing like this had been attempted before along the edge of the open ocean," Craft said.

"The storms would come up out of nowhere, and all the boats, tugs, barges and floating cranes would have to stop work and come back into Little Creek. We were dealing with conditions that no one else had ever faced with something this long and complex."

Not even the on-site forecasters brought in to track the shifty wind and seas could foretell what the work crews would find when they set out from Little Creek each morning.

"It was very unpredictable — and every time the wind would start coming out of the north or east at more than 15 mph the seas would start getting pretty bad," recalls Fowler, who wore ID badge No. 2.

"After about a month, we realized it wasn't working. So we had the men show up every morning regardless of the forecast. Then we’d pay them for four hours and send them home if it was too rough to go out."

Bogged down

Far beneath the waves and the bay's bottom, the test borings uncovered evidence of another formidable obstacle.

Sandwiched in the clay 70 feet below the north edge of the Thimble Shoal channel was a 50-foot-thick layer of soft, potentially unstable peat that posed significant problems for the construction of the first tunnel's north island.

Draining and compacting the underground bog took six months, with crews driving more than 3,800 steel pipes 100 feet into the bottom in order to release the trapped water. Then they piled up thousands of tons of extra sand, squeezing the spongy deposit into a hard, firm stratum.

That hard-won success didn't come without a deadly cost, however.

"When you put a big steel pipe 100 feet into the ground, you’re dealing with some pretty strong forces when you pull them out," Fowler says, his voice becoming solemn.

"One of them buckled the crane boom and killed two men."

Hard start

Despite the tragedy, the construction of the Chesapeake Bay islands and tunnels was not the biggest engineering challenge.

The same kind of trench-cut tubes had been used in the Hampton Roads and Downtown tunnels, Fowler said, and a third was under construction at the Midtown Tunnel. So while two underwater crossings meant double the work, the length of the tunnels and the engineering methods used to construct them were already familiar and well-established.

Far less certain was the 12 miles of elevated concrete trestle that made up two-thirds of the crossing.

And when the crews drove the first of what would become more than 2,600 pilings into the unusually hard sand off Chesapeake Beach, the work was slow and difficult.

"When we first started, we were driving the piles from a floating rig — and we were having all sorts of problems," says Craft, who had become Sverdrup & Parcel's resident engineer for the trestles.

"I was worried that we had bitten off more than we could chew."

Even before they began to toil, however, work was well underway in Richmond on a giant $1.5 million machine that would draw international attention as the largest marine pile driver in the world.

Rising from a jumbo barge measuring 70 feet wide, 150 feet long and 1,650 tons, "Big D" could float into place, than brace itself against the waves by lowering four 6-foot-wide, 100-foot-long legs to the bottom.

Its heavy onboard crane could hoist pilings of 200 feet long and more than 150,000 pounds with ease, then place them inside the towering frame of a steam-driven pile driver that not only swiveled back and forth to a exact position and angle but also cut a path for its 25,000-pound hammer with two water jets.

So indispensable did this floating leviathan become that — after it lost a leg, turned over and sank in the fury of the Ash Wednesday storm — work on the long line of pilings came to a halt until it could be partly salvaged and replaced.

"‘Big D’ saved us," Craft says. "Without it, we’d still be out there."

Monster trio

Following the pile driver north across the bay were two other innovative machines designed and fabricated in Hampton Roads.

The "Two-Headed Monster" featured a 177-foot-long truss bridge that traveled over the tops of the pilings, cutting each trio of cylinders to uniform height with a derrick crane mounted on the front and then tying them together with a cap lowered into place by a second crane operating from the back.

Trailing behind was a third mechanical monster — the "Slab Setter" — which built the base for the roadway by positioning precast concrete sections between each group of trestles.

Moving in 75-foot strides, it literally picked itself up after completing each new segment, then cartwheeled sideways through the air before settling into place and starting the sequence again.

"Three gigantic machines, 150 to 180 feet long, are striding, rolling and swinging themselves across the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay," reported Popular Science in a superlative-filled March 1962 story.

"In assembly-line fashion, they’re building a highway over virtually open sea … eliminating the last water barrier to the Ocean Highway (with) … an engineering wonder so bold in scale as to dwarf anything else of its kind in the world."

Scores and scores of other magazines and newspapers wrote similarly admiring stories.

Hundreds of engineers came to gape and ogle, too, including bridge-building specialists from Japan and the Soviet Union.

"People came just to see the machines we were using," says Fowler, who wrote an award-winning paper on the work for the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1962.

"And they came from all over the world."

Fifty years later, the crossing still ranks among the longest bridge-tunnel complexes on the planet.

And though it dropped off the list of modern engineering wonders long ago, it still draws attention for its size and complexity as well as its exposed location skirting the edge of the ocean.

"For an engineer — especially one as young as I was — it was a very exciting time — an experience you don't get but once in a lifetime," Crafts says.

"But sometimes it could be a little terrifying, too."

Erickson can be reached at 757-247-4783.

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