Geomatics Engineering Alumnus Hosts Tour of Port of Miami Tunnel
Left to right: Robert Loane and FAU faculty members Donald Leone, Loren Gibson and FAU student, Christina Plattner.
FAU geomatics engineering students and faculty were recently given a unique opportunity by one of the first graduates of the program and his employer to tour the Port of Miami Tunnel construction site. Robert Loane ’11 is a tunnel surveyor for Bouygues Civil Works Florida, where he and his colleagues are busy supporting tunnel boring operations between Watson Island and Dodge Island in the City of Miami. By invitation from Bouygues, 20 students, faculty, staff and industry advisors from the geomatics engineering program were given a tour of the construction site. The Port of Miami Tunnel is a pair of tunnels which, when completed, will provide a direct highway between the Port of Miami on Dodge Island and Interstate Route 395, the MacArthur Causeway. This highway, which will go beneath the ocean channel running between Dodge and Watson Islands, will permit vehicular traffic to reach the island without traveling on the downtown streets of Miami. Each tunnel of the pair will be more than 3,000 feet long.
The pinnacle of the visit was walking into the 700-foot length of tunnel dug to date to view the $45 million tunnel boring machine (TBM). The TBM is a 457-foot long, 43-foot diameter electric digging machine, which is controlled from a closet-sized room with touch screen displays, computer terminals, and numerous knobs and switches. Two of the touch screen displays are devoted to providing the pilot with information about the position and orientation of the TBM in real time during production. While Loane and his fellow surveyors have many duties at the site of the project, it is their specialized knowledge and skills in geomatics engineering that keep the 265-ton cutting head digging along the path of the tunnel as designed. Without the tunnel surveyors, the guidance displays in the control room would be devoid of information, and digging would not be possible.
April 18, 2012