As passenger counts continue to grow, airport officials knew they had to expand. But they didn’t want to shut down the concourse to widen it.
Hartsfield-Jackson officials and contractors came up with a plan to prefab sections of the concourse expansion at a site near the airfield, and then transport them overnight to Concourse D.
Each piece will take about an hour to travel the 1-mile distance to the concourse from the construction site off Sullivan Road on the south side of the airfield.
The huge building section will sit atop a self-propelled modular transporter (SPMT) — a motorized platform on wheels. The vehicle moves at about 1 mph and is typically used to transport large things like oil refinery equipment, bridge sections, roofs and other sections of buildings.
The route the SPMT will take has been carefully studied for slopes or changes in grade, since it will be traversed by a low-riding vehicle carrying a section of a building about 40 feet tall, 30 feet wide and up to 192 feet long.
The transport of the first concourse piece is tentatively scheduled for the wee hours of April 24. By 1 a.m., flight operations slow to a trickle and the taxiways and runways on the south side of the airfield can be shut down to make way for the operation.
“We’ve got a window to move it from 1 a.m. to 4” in the morning, said Pete Pemantell, vice president of operations with Holder and project director for Holder-Moody-Bryson-Sovereign, the joint venture handling the Concourse D widening project. About 200 workers are involved in the project.
The contractors have spent months preparing, and have a detailed, minute-by-minute plan for preparation and the actual movement of the first 160-foot-long piece. The building section will have to go through security screening before it is transported onto the airfield.
The project to widen the concourse from 60 feet to 99 feet has already caused some disruption to travelers.
To prepare to attach the expansion pieces, the airport has…
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