Galveston cruise terminal expansion coming to completion

​GALVESTON – Teams are a week away from substantial completion on an expansion project at the Port of Galveston’s Cruise Terminal No. 2. 

This $12 million renovation adds a 60,000-sf expansion to the existing 90,000-sf terminal. Upon completion, the newly expanded facility will be able to accommodate larger vessels, such as Liberty of the Seas, a 1,100-foot cruise ship owned by Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd.

 

“The existing cruise terminal facility also needed to be expanded in order to accommodate the greater number of passengers,” says Kyle Rodemacher, design manager with the project’s contractor Webber LLC.

 

Work is scheduled for substantial completion on June 1, but teams faced several challenges en route to that milestone, including foundation and soil conditions, and maintaining the project while the existing terminal remained fully operational.

 

The original design of the site and building footprint was rendered nearly impossible when having to contend with the soft soils and subsequent consolidation and settlement issues.

 

As luck would have it, a portion of the main building’s footprint actually fell within the existing footprint of a neighboring, long-abandoned grain silo that was built back in the 1930s.

 

“Those grain silo foundations were about 13 feet below our finished floor, but they were very robust—40-inch thick reinforced concrete slab supported on 30-foot long timber piles spaced at 2-feet-6-inch on center each way,” Jelinek says. “By occupying or configuring the building over that existing foundation footprint, the issues with respect to the soft clay, highly consolidated soil under those loads, were mitigated. That took the efforts of the entire team to execute that creative solution.”

 

The proposed location included in the RFP had roughly two-thirds of the building over the grain silo foundation, Rodemacher says.

 

During construction, the cruise facility remained fully operational. Cruise ship customers—numbering in the thousands at a time for both incoming and outgoing ships—and the construction team even shared a parking lot, and traffic around the site included heavy construction machinery and material deliveries amid incoming and outgoing passengers.