The award closed in early June. Steel City Tunnel Partners, a joint venture of Brayman Construction and Lane Construction, has won the roughly $1 billion contract to bore the Ohio River Tunnel for the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority. It’s the anchor package of ALCOSAN’s Clean Water Plan, and the biggest single wet-weather job the authority has ever put out to bid.
The tunnel will run deep under Pittsburgh’s rivers to catch combined sewage that now overflows into the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela during heavy rain. ALCOSAN expects it to cut those overflows by about 7 billion gallons a year once the wider regional tunnel system comes online.
What the Ohio River Tunnel contract covers
Lane, part of the Webuild group, holds a 50% stake and brings soft-ground tunneling experience. Brayman, headquartered nearby in Saxonburg, handles the heavy civil and shaft work close to home. The scope runs to mining the main tunnel, sinking drop shafts, and building the near-surface structures that feed flow into it. Crews mobilize this year.
ALCOSAN is under a federal consent decree to fix its combined-sewer problem, so the schedule isn’t optional. The Clean Water Plan has been reworked more than once to bring the price down from earlier estimates that topped $2 billion for the tunnel program alone.
Why a deep storage tunnel, not more pipe
Combined sewers mix stormwater and sewage in one pipe. They were standard a century ago, and they still serve much of older industrial America. When it pours, the system fills and dumps the excess straight to the river rather than backing it up into basements. A deep rock tunnel gives that overflow somewhere to sit until the treatment plant can catch up, which is cheaper across a dense city than tearing up every street to separate the pipes.
Pittsburgh joins Washington, Cleveland, and Indianapolis, all of which have gone the same route under their own consent decrees. The engineering is well understood. The hard part is money and disruption, and both get easier when a single JV owns the mining risk. Combined-sewer work is quietly one of the steadiest lines in U.S. heavy civil right now, running alongside the rail and tunnel packages tracked in Exchange’s infrastructure listings.
For Brayman and Lane, the win locks up years of Pittsburgh backlog. For ALCOSAN ratepayers, the meter starts now.
Project profile: ALCOSAN Ohio River Tunnel on Exchange.