Pittsburgh’s biggest water job in a generation has a builder. Steel City Tunnel Partners, a joint venture of Lane Construction and Brayman Construction, has won a $1 billion contract to build the Ohio River Tunnel for the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, the firms said in a June announcement. It’s the first of three deep tunnels in a clean-water program that will eventually run to about $4.5 billion.
What the Ohio River Tunnel contract covers
The crews will mine roughly 4.9 miles of deep tunnel, sink multiple shafts, and build regulator structures and the near-surface facilities that tie it all together. Those works are designed to catch and carry wet-weather combined sewer flows, the mix of sanitary wastewater and stormwater that Pittsburgh’s older neighborhoods still send down a single pipe. ALCOSAN says the main tunnel’s final design is already complete.
The split of labor is clean. Lane, the U.S. arm of Italian contractor Webuild, runs project management and the major tunneling. Brayman, headquartered in Pittsburgh, takes the heavy civil and shaft construction. “We have studied and followed ALCOSAN’s Clean Water Plan for more than a decade, and we look forward to delivering the Ohio River Tunnel section alongside our partner, Lane,” said Brayman CEO Stephen Muck.
Why a sewer tunnel matters for Allegheny County
The number that justifies the price tag is 7 billion. That’s roughly how many gallons of combined sewer overflow the finished system will keep out of regional rivers each year, redirecting the excess to treatment instead of into the Ohio, Allegheny and Monongahela. The Ohio River Tunnel is the lead project; an Allegheny River Tunnel, a Monongahela River Tunnel and an expansion of ALCOSAN’s North-End plant round out the plan.
Water work has turned into one of the few reliably busy corners of U.S. heavy civil, and the deals keep getting larger. Garney’s recent groundbreaking on Tampa’s $1.2 billion One Water program made the same point on the opposite coast. Federal consent decrees, aging combined systems and decades of deferred capital are pushing cities toward megaproject-scale fixes, and contractors with tunneling depth are the ones positioned to bid them.
For the Pittsburgh region, the award starts a clock that’s been ticking since the consent-decree era began. “Lane, as a partner of Steel City Tunnel Partners, is proud to be awarded this landmark project, which will play a vital role in protecting the Ohio River,” said Lane COO Daniele Nebbia. The harder part, decades of it, starts underground.
Source: Construction Dive. Program detail via ALCOSAN’s Clean Water Plan.