J.F. Shea Construction

J.F. Shea Construction is the heavy civil arm of J.F. Shea Co., a family-owned business founded in 1881 and headquartered in Walnut, California. The firm specializes in tunneling, water and wastewater treatment plants, dams, pipelines and transit infrastructure, and is one of a small group of U.S. contractors that regularly self-performs large-diameter soft-ground tunnel work. J.F. Shea is a partner in the Kiewit Shea Traylor Joint Venture holding Contract Package 2 on VTA’s BART Silicon Valley Phase II extension, the six-mile San Jose project whose five-mile, 43-foot-diameter single bore is the first application of single-bore tunneling to urban transit in the United States. The company’s earlier work includes the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge foundations.

J.F. Shea Construction says it self-performs about 78 percent of its own work, subcontracting only specialized trades like paving, electrical and paint — a figure the company cites on its water division page as central to how it controls quality, schedule and cost on complex jobs. That capability extends to full design-build delivery: the firm names its $1.1 billion No. 7 Line Extension and Second Avenue Subway tunnel and station work for New York City’s MTA, completed in 2015, as the project where it “perfected” modern design-build methods in tunneling and transit work, and it has since carried that approach into two Los Angeles County Metro design-build jobs, the Crenshaw/LAX Transit Corridor and the Westside Subway extension beneath Wilshire Boulevard.

The company’s water division, built on more than 130 years of institutional experience treating, storing and conveying water, has delivered some of the largest facilities of their kind on the West Coast. Its own project list includes the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, the largest desalination facility in the Western Hemisphere at 54 million gallons of drinking water a day; the Orange County Water District’s Groundwater Replenishment System, which supplies 75 million gallons of fresh water daily; and the Orange County Sanitation District’s Plant No. 2 Headworks Replacement, treating 168 million gallons of wastewater a day.

Outside the tunnel and water businesses, J.F. Shea runs a Redding, California division founded in 1956 that operates its own aggregate, asphalt and ready-mix plants along the Interstate 5 corridor between Redding and Medford, Oregon, and a Pennsylvania highway and bridge division, started in 2004, that works with PennDOT and the state’s turnpike commission on accelerated-schedule bridge and highway rebuilds. Across all of it, the company traces its tunneling pedigree back to helping pioneer the modern tunnel boring machine during decades of large-diameter tunnel work that began in the late 1950s.