To bore the new tube of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, enough muck will be extracted to fill about 50,000 dump trucks – muck that recent tests confirmed will be contaminated by the boring process and must be disposed of in a protected landfill.
In a region familiar with underwater traffic tunnels, it’s an unfamiliar wrinkle.
The CBBT’s latest tunnel – a $756 million, mile-long parallel tube under the southern shipping channel – will be the first in Virginia built by a boring machine, worming its way through the bay bottom.
All other tunnels in the area – a total of 10 tubes – are trench-style. Muck was scooped out the old-fashioned way, bucket by bucket, leaving most of it “clean” enough to be dumped offshore.
