Port of Seattle, Clark Construction Reach Sea-Tac Airport Project Settlement

A greater than two-year authorized battle between the Port of Seattle and Clark Building over the $1-billion Seattle-Tacoma Worldwide Airport Worldwide Arrivals Facility mission has reached a settlement conclusion earlier than the trial section. 

The mission, which includes a new worldwide arrivals corridor, a redesign of the face of the prevailing Concourse A and a redesigned South Satellite tv for pc Terminal opened in April 2022. The port alleges the terminal was deliberate to accommodate 20 large-body planes at gates at anyone time.

The Port of Seattle sued Clark Construction in January 2023 for $100 million claiming solely 16 wide-body planes may match on the new gates supporting the arrivals corridor at one time. That lawsuit got here after Clark Building of Maryland sued the Port for greater than $60 million plus authorized charges in December 2022 for prices related to design adjustments and pandemic slowdowns. 

Whereas Clark served because the lead on the design-build mission, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was the architectural agency on the arrivals corridor and Arup served because the designer of the brand new gates. 

In settlement settlement paperwork, as reported by Puget Sound Enterprise Journal, Clark pays the Port $28 million, and the Port pays Clark $13.79 million. An Arup spokesperson informed ENR the agency couldn’t touch upon the settlement given the confidentiality of the settlement. Spokespeople for each Clark and the Port didn’t return requests for remark. 

In 2023, Arup informed ENR that the progressive design-build course of had Clark, SOM, Arup and the Port working collaboratively on the brand new facility, configured round current gasoline pits and passenger boarding bridges. On the time, Arup mentioned that if the Port wanted further operational flexibility past what was within the contract, “we might be comfortable to collectively discover alternate options with the workforce.” 

The Port claimed in 2023 that the capability points on the gates may result in “damages to the Port’s operations within the tens or a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} over the anticipated lifetime of this mission,” and offers the airport “an international-flight capability drawback that this mission was initially meant to unravel.” 

The Port has mentioned it’s working to deal with the deficiencies, however a brand new plan has not been made public. 

The mission changed a 50-year-old facility with one 5 instances bigger at 450,000 sq ft and providing the world’s longest aerial walkway over an lively taxi lane. The 610-ft-long clear span and 85-ft vertical clearance permits for area for planes to securely taxi beneath.

To make sure the development didn’t intrude with airport operations, crews used the Accelerated Bridge Building methodology to construct the walkway offsite in a number of items. With 17 main prefabricated elements, the three,000-ton construction wanted seven metal fabricators all inside a three-hour radius of the mission to create the elements.

With particular person metal items weighing as much as 170 tons and coming with distinctive angles, particular person welds have been as much as 6 ft in size and three.5 in deep. Probably the most complicated prefabrication part, the middle span, was constructed off-site on the north finish of the airfield, about 2 miles from the bridge location.