REA Final - 22 Dec 20 - eBook - 1682 pages

concourse,” says Richard Smyth, the port authority’s LaGuardia project director. “That will open by the end of 2021. By January of 2022, we will open up remaining portions of the concourse. Then we will demolish the old concourse.” All structures on the entire $8-billion program had to meet new FEMA flood requirements. “The floodmaps we had for this area weren’t really updated” at the beginning of work, notes Thomas Nilsson, vice president at Skanska USA. “We had to go to FEMA to revise the maps. When we designed the terminal, we had to address flooding in different ways in different locations.” The two new concourses will be connected to Terminal B by 450-ft-long steel pedestrian bridges soaring 80 ft over the active airfield. “The original design [for Terminal B] included opening the headhouse in three phases,” says Nilsson. “But with the bridges, we could go over the existing terminal and open the headhouse all at once.” The steel trusses are fortified by customized molded glass-fiber-reinforced gypsum or glass-fiber-reinforced concrete segments, says Andee Hidalgo, CEO of Spearhead Construction, the interior construction services subcontractor. Launched in 2016, the M/WBE and Service Disabled Veteran Owned Business worked with Skanska and started big with the LaGuardia job. On the Skanska-Walsh portion, $684 million in work is subcontracted to M/WBEs and disabled owners. “I know what it’s like to work in a difficult theater with the stakes high,” says Hidalgo, an Army veteran who received mentoring from Skanska’s Building Blocks program. “That translated easily for me at LaGuardia.” Delta Connections Next “door,” Delta Air Lines has the 230,000-fq-ft second concourse under construction. While the Skanska-Walsh work is part of the nation’s largest aviation public-private partnership in history, Delta acts as the general