The boat ride through Anaheim Bay into Huntington Harbour is a little more relaxed these days now that both naval vessels and pleasure boaters alike can pass through the bay without interruptions to their travel time.
Nearly five years have passed since the start of dredging and construction at Naval Weapons Station (WPNSTA) Seal Beach in Southern California. A joint venture between Manson and Connolly-Pacific Co. (Connolly), in January 2021, the project’s first stage successfully opened a public navigation channel—one of the Navy’s primary concerns— which separates Navy traffic from civilian boat traffic. The new channel provides civilians with a safer and more efficient route to the Pacific Ocean.
“The Navy has an ammunition loadout facility at Seal Beach that connects the Pacific Ocean to Huntington Harbour,” says Manson Project Manager Thomas Gomez. “All pleasure crafts that dock at Huntington Harbour passed the naval facility, which presented security and safety issues for the Navy and civilians.”
Manson crews dredged more than 1.4 million cubic yards of material from several sites along the existing navigation channel passing through WPNSTA Seal Beach and Huntington Harbour. The excavated material was repurposed to build the causeway—a physical barrier that separates the existing and new channels—in tandem with the more than 800,000-ton rock placement from the
Connolly project team and crew. In addition, the Seal Beach crew resurfaced the causeway to serve as a pathway for trucks. “We reached multiple milestones on the project, including the production of material and placement and completion of all rock structures,” says Connolly’s Project Manager Michelle Finegold. “The dedication of Manson’s project teams and crews to making a safe and successful project is a major reason why the Connolly and Manson joint venture was, has, and will continue to be a successful partnership.”
In addition to the reconfiguration of Anaheim Bay, the project involved the replacement of an aging ammunition pier, the construction of waterfront facilities and a causeway, and the addition of a truck turnaround.
Improving the Ammunition Pier at WPNSTA Seal Beach
With the new navigation channel in use, Manson shifted its attention to constructing a new 1,500-ft pier that extends from land to sea, improving support to modern naval vessels and providing an efficient structure for loading and offloading ammunition for the Pacific Fleet.
“The existing pier was past its life span,” Thomas says. The Navy wanted a bigger facility with the ability to load two medium-sized ships or one larger ship. In the past, they would have to fly ammunition offshore near Camp Pendleton and load from there.”
To gather more information for the pier’s structural design, Manson drove test piles in September 2021 using the derrick barge VALKYRIE. Concrete test piles were driven within a few feet of the existing wharf, providing crucial data on the bearing capacity of the piles in the soil conditions. This allowed the project team to order piles in the correct lengths.
Once the test piles met the expectations of the Navy and Manson teams, the VALKYRIE crew drove 321 concrete piles in the water for the pier. Once the in-water pile driving was complete, another crew commenced the land pile driving portion utilizing a Manitowoc 2250 crawler crane working from the truck turnaround area. The land pile driving operations took place while Navy ships made the passage to and from Anaheim Bay, meaning the project team had to prioritize minimizing impacts to base operations.
“A good portion of the new pier is both overland and overwater, but our main concern was getting piles into the ground,” says Manson General Superintendent Chris Eagle. “I worked closely with port operations to communicate when ships would have to pass while crews completed the work. One of the main priorities was making sure there were no interruptions for the Navy, public, and Manson’s operations.”
While the Manitowoc 2250 crane continued to drive 341 land piles, Manson derrick barge VULCAN mobilized to assist the crew with falsework installation for the new pier.
Crews made quick work of the land pile driving phase and the falsework installation. The Seal Beach team orchestrated the first of 19 concrete pours in May 2022 and completed the final pour in January 2023.
On April 10, 2024, WPNSTA Seal Beach welcomed the guided missile destroyer USS PAUL HAMILTON as the first naval ship to dock at the new 1,500-ft pier, marking a significant milestone for the Navy and the Seal Beach project team.
With the navigation channel and ammunition pier completed, the Manson/Connolly Seal Beach JV team anticipates completing deck infrastructure and support buildings in the summer of 2024 to finish out the project, according to Thomas. “Staying on-time with a five-year project schedule and executing the work at a high level is phenomenal,” Thomas says. “I am very proud of the staff who helped push the project forward, especially planning the project during the early days of COVID. People like Chris Eagle, Pile Driver Foreman Eddie Heredia (retired), and Carpenter Foreman Tommy Brown and Mike Gatlin were instrumental in managing crews to complete high-quality work through their wealth of knowledge and experience.”
