Client: Port of Seattle
Owner: Port of Seattle
Cost of Work: $60 million

PND provided marine engineering for the comprehensive redevelopment of Seattle's downtown waterfront covering Piers 64, 65, and 66 and the uplands across Alaskan Way to the Highway Viaduct. Features included hotels, condominiums, retail shops, a convention center, maritime museum, restaurant, cruise ship terminal, marina, and fish processing facilities. Marine project elements included a full-service marina for transient moorage with a handicap access ramp, a 900-foot-long fixed breakwater employing our state-of-the-art wave barrier research, 126,600 square feet of concrete dock structures, shore protection design, pile foundations for the building structures, and the rehabilitation of an existing bulkhead. Approximately 1,900 linear feet of dock utilizes PND’s heavy drop-in dock fenders. More than 7½ miles of concrete piling were required, as well as 11 miles of steel pipe piling with 374 of PND’s SPIN FIN® piles. The permeable wave barrier was designed to resist 8-foot waves producing more than 8 tons per horizontal foot of pressure along the wall.

PND was also responsible for demolition engineering of the existing dock structure, all mechanical and electrical engineering, surveying, soils exploration and three-dimensional wave modeling at BC Re-search Lab in Vancouver, Canada. A 430-ton tension pile load test was also performed to confirm the 160-ton design uplift forces on the SPIN FIN® pile tips.

The handicapped access ramp is 110 feet long and 10 feet wide and capable of resisting a 100 psf live load. It lands in a float platform approximately 8 feet above the float deck, satisfying ADA scope criteria for a longer duration through the 18-foot tide cycles. The platform has a series of ramps and resting areas combined with a stairway to accommodate ADA access for the remaining height differential. The platform elevation was set such that a 1:12 slope criteria was met 85% of the time during daylight hours.

This project has earned several awards, most recently Special Rec-ognition in the Deep Foundation Institute’s Outstanding Project Award competition for 2001.