When men split the sea: Building the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
Half a century ago, 2,000 workers crossed 17 miles of water with concrete, steel and rock. Seven would die. The others lived to tell of ferocious storms and hard-charging men. This is their tale.
The generator chugged to a stop as a young man in an aluminum hard hat and red-orange life vest cut the engine.
Bill Craft liked to do this when he could. It quieted his workspace, which amounted to a plywood-decked, steel platform on four legs in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. The entire structure twisted gently in the current. Seagulls looking for food squawked overhead.
Craft took in the view as fumes from the generator faded in the salt breeze. The beaches of Norfolk and Virginia Beach lay to the south, the Eastern Shore to the north, but land was too far away for him to spot. It was water in every direction.
Here, at the doorstep of the Atlantic Ocean, men were about to do what skeptics said was impossible.
They would cross more than 15 miles of sea with concrete, steel and rock to form the longest bridge-and-tunnel span in the world. They would build four islands where there was nothing, with stones so large that some arrived from quarries two per rail car. They would use hulking, crane-topped rigs dreamed up by engineers that took on names like "the Big D" and "the Two-Headed Monster."
The design and construction firms would need more than 2,000 workers. Seven died on the project. The others lived to tell of ferocious storms and helicopter rescues, of gorgeous, calm days and of hard-charging, rollicking men who worked without harnesses and lost entire paychecks gambling their way back to shore.
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel turns 50 this week. Upon its completion, it was named one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern world. Half a century later, the story of its creation remains a marvel all its own.
Average good luck
The pursuit of a crossing over the Chesapeake Bay officially began in 1956. That year, Virginia's General Assembly authorized a study to see whether a fixed span could replace the ferries shuttling more than 50,000 vehicles a month between the mainland and the Eastern Shore. The trips took an hour and a half after lengthy waits to get on, and demand was rising.
The task of answering the question fell to a team led by Norfolk-based Tidewater Construction and an engineering firm from St. Louis named Sverdrup & Parcel. Borings were made across the bay to learn about the soil. Later, towers were erected so crews could locate positions by telescope, compass and triangulation, and to measure how well test pilings supported various weights.
Tap or click the boxes on the map below to discover facts about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
Craft, then in his mid-20s, passed many days on those towers. On some, he worked 12-hour shifts with a marine radio, a hot plate and one other man, recording movements on a test pile every half-hour. A small shed provided shelter. After one storm, he returned to shore and bought a $200,000 life insurance policy.
The designers knew their creation needed more than just the right foundation.
The chosen path crossed two of the busiest shipping channels in the world. The one closer to Norfolk was, and still is, used heavily by the Navy, and the brass there squelched any thought of crossing it with a bridge. An enemy could bomb the span and block the fleet from the ocean.
Officials in Maryland objected to bridging the second channel, which led to their port in Baltimore. A plan was laid to go under the two corridors with tunnels, each about a mile long.
Another accommodation was made near the Eastern Shore at Fisherman Island. There, a steel bridge, higher than the rest of the concrete trestle that would cross most of the bay, was designed to give clearance to fishing boats and other craft.
The tunneling plan required four islands – one at each end of the two tubes – where vehicles would roll from above the bay to beneath it. Mounds of sand, rock and concrete, rising 30 feet out of the sea, also would support buildings for the huge fans necessary to clear the tubes of exhaust.
In late summer of 1960, nearly $200 million in bonds was issued to fund construction. No public money was used; tolls would repay the debt.
Engineers had to build a structure that could withstand hurricanes, heavy currents and the battering of waves that swept in from the Atlantic. Their design featured a concrete road supported by concrete cylinders that measured 4½ feet across and would be driven as deep as 125 feet into the soil.
The leaders of the companies that partnered to span the Chesapeake predicted they could finish the project within 3½ years. Although confident, they knew no engineer could fully account for the greatest variable.
In 1961, with construction under way, George F. Ferris, board chairman of Raymond International, the firm that developed the concrete pile technology the builders would use, acknowledged that calculations and foresight could go only so far in controlling such a volatile workplace:
"In spite of all our advanced planning, our performance depends on average good luck with the weather."
Lee Purkey, an inspector from Missouri, had never been around dolphins until his work on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The first time he saw their fins, he thought he was being circled by sharks.
Get a life jacket
The men arrived in droves. Some were experienced laborers, tradesmen and operating engineers who chased jobs from state to state. Others were locals, some still in their teens and living at home, with lunch sacks packed by their mothers.
Dickie Foster was hired soon after he graduated from Norview High School in Norfolk. He was placed on shore duty at the main yard near Little Creek, and within a couple of weeks, his work ethic was noticed. A supervisor approached him:
"Do you want to work on the water?"
The 17-year-old didn't know what he'd be doing but was eager for the chance. His interest only rose when he learned that just the boat ride to the job site paid $15 a week. Union workers had secured the benefit by striking for 26 days that spring, arguing they should be compensated for the trips, which could take 90 minutes or more each way.
Foster said yes.
"Get a life jacket, and get on the boat now," the supervisor said.
Out on the water, Foster promptly got off at the wrong rig, inciting curses from men on radios. The transport boat returned to fetch him. When he made it to the right place, the flustered teenager confronted a dangling rope ladder that he didn't know how to climb.
Foster stepped on and began swinging wildly on his way up. An old wooden toolbox that his father had given him hung over his back on a rope that he had slung around his neck; now it was choking him.
Near the top of his ascent, Foster looked up and saw yet another obstacle: Because of how he was climbing the ladder, his body was turned the wrong way to fit through an opening to the deck. His new foreman, whom Foster had yet to meet, looked down at him through the crevice.
"Just what I need," the older man said. "Another dumbass."
Photos: Building the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
These photos show the construction of different components of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
This was the only way – until the steel seal was cut out – to get to a tube’s interior. Tunnel men called it a snorkel shaft.
Once the tunnels were lowered onto the bay floor, workers climbed inside and tiled the walls and ceiling. There are 37 tubes, each 286 feet long.
Placed every 75 feet along the 17-mile route, the pilings provided the foundation for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The pillars are more than 4 feet wide and were driven as far as 125 feet into the bay floor.
The road for the bridge-tunnel came by boat, and the concrete you drive over to get to the Eastern Shore was once split up into sets of four 65-ton slabs. Laid side-by-side, they make up the 28-foot-wide highway. The giant crane was called the Slab Setter.
The Two-Headed Monster was almost 180 feet long, and it slid the length of the route to finish off the pilings. At the front, men sheared off each column to a uniform height by drilling holes inch by inch around it. At the back, its crane lowered 40-ton concrete caps over the pilings, and it was on to the next set.
Workers built four islands from the bay floor up as stages for entering and exiting the two tunnels. They started with a rock berm at the bottom and filled in the center with sand. Then more rocks and more sand, again and again, until land emerged from water.
Sections of the tunnels, which were built in Texas, are floated across the Chesapeake Bay to the project site.
Sand from the bay floor got pumped through a pipeline to finish off the islands. The four islands rise about 30 feet above the water, each with a surface area of about 8 acres. They cost about $5 million apiece and, in addition to providing access to the tunnels, they hold garages for emergency equipment and buildings for lighting and ventilation.
Welders work on the approach to one of the man-made islands. It took more than 2,000 men to bring the bridge-tunnel over and under water.
From this tower and others, workers bored into the bay floor to collect soil samples before construction started.
The concrete piles that hold up the bridge started out as metal frames.
Workers set up concrete frames in one of the ventilation buildings in October 1962. That big half-circle on the right is part of the steel cap for the first tube of the Thimble Shoal tunnel. Once the tubes were connected and sealed, the caps were cut away.
Towers were built before the project began to locate positions by telescope, compass and triangulation.
Men help bring Buck Rouzie from the floor of the bay, where he and other workers were planting the foundation for the Fisherman Island section of the crossing in 1961.
Huge stones were placed on top of the tunnels.
The toll booths on the south end of the bridge-tunnel were nearly complete in November 1963. No taxpayer money was used to build the span; the debt would be repaid with the tolls.
$1.83 an hour
Many of the locals had experience on the Chesapeake from fishing it with their fathers or working various jobs. Others drove from inland states knowing little of the bay's immense size and power.
"Gaaaw-ly," said a worker from West Virginia, rubbing his eyes after napping through his first boat ride to the job site. "It's the biggest crick I ever did see."
Lee Purkey, an inspector from Missouri with Sverdrup & Parcel, spotted fins by his survey tower and thought he was being circled by sharks. It was his first time around dolphins.
To get to the project, workers filed into crew boats that resembled school buses inside, with an aisle down the center and 40 or more seats. Many of the men passed the time smoking, filling the compartment with a haze. Some read. Others played poker or craps when the seas weren't too rough for cards and dice.
For those given to nausea, the rides could be dreadful. Some used their hard hats when they became sick, then rinsed them with seawater.
Melvin Griffin, the oldest of 12 siblings, was in his late teens and making more than his father did as a civil servant. He drove with friends an hour each day from North Carolina to make $1.83 an hour. That jumped to $2.95 when he switched from pouring concrete to a pile-driving crew. His union job paid time-and-a-half after eight hours each day and for the first four hours on Saturdays. After that, it doubled.
In nine months, Griffin saved enough to buy his first car, a 1958 Ford, and a 1956 Mercury station wagon for his parents. The gift made his mother cry.
Scarce time existed for lives away from work. Griffin looked toward land one night from the island he was helping build and saw the lights of the Ocean View Ferris wheel. Sights like that made him pine for his girlfriend.
The surface of each island – its base was even larger – was wider than a football field and more than four times as long. Cranes on floating platforms started by placing rock and large stones in a perimeter on the bay floor. Sand was then dumped inside. The process repeated, level by level, until land emerged from water, giving workers and bulldozers a surface to begin building the approach road to the tunnel.
Dean Dunn once spent the better part of three days straight on an island to pour concrete for a foundation. He and other workers lived off the cooking of a Navy corpsman who was placed there to provide first aid who also sold hot dogs and soup. Between shifts, Dunn rested for a few hours in a shed, falling asleep to the rumbling of a diesel engine and the constant pounding from air-driven pile-driving equipment: shh-kaBOOM ... shh-kaBOOM ... shh-kaBOOM.
In his second year on the project, Dunn asked for a weekend off to get married. He was back to work on Monday.
Dickie Foster worked on the Two-Headed Monster, created specifically for the project. The steel contraption sat on top of the concrete pilings.
Frozen on a ladder
Any construction site is dangerous, but building in swells and currents required a unique blend of vigilance and derring-do.
Transfers between boats, barges and the growing bridge presented a frequent danger. Captains could not always nose their crafts neatly against ladders, so workers often had to jump from a rocking boat or land on one, the surfaces slippery from sea spray and, in the winter, ice.
In rough weather, the men tried to leap from the boat when the bow was at its highest point. Jumping too soon put them at risk of getting smacked by the craft on its upswing. Too late, and they might miss their target.
Foster once hurt himself when the surface he was aiming for kept going down as he was about to land. His gruff foreman told him he was overreacting to the pain. Foster didn't know he had a broken leg until six weeks later, when bad weather gave him a day off and time to see a doctor.
By then, he was immersed in a crew that ran a rig known as the Two-Headed Monster. Created for the project, the steel contraption sat on top of the concrete pilings that were pounded in sets of three every 75 feet along the route.
At the front of the rig, workers cut off uneven portions of the pilings that had been placed ahead of it. The soil at the bottom of the bay varied in firmness, and not every pile could be driven to the same depth. Some went so deep that they didn't stick far enough out of the water. Those needed another section of piling to bring them to the correct height.
On the Monster's back end, a crane lifted a rectangular concrete block off a barge and lowered it over the pilings behind. More concrete was poured to secure it. When capped, each set of three pilings, called a bent, looked like a Stonehenge monument sticking out of the water. Another rig followed, setting slabs of concrete roadway – more than 3,400 in all – over the supports.
Work on the Monster literally rolled along. Railroad tracks attached to the underside of the rig allowed it to move from bent to bent over temporary wheels that were placed on the uncapped pilings after they were sheared to size.
On the water, a boisterous boat captain from Louisiana ferried the caps and additional concrete to the Monster. Known as "Wide Open Wells" because of his fondness for going full throttle, he stood well over 6 feet and steered with large, weathered hands that looked like a blacksmith's.
On warm days, workers heard Wide Open through his windows and over the roar of his engines, singing in a Cajun accent about bayous. Other times, they could hear him swearing at his deckhand.
Some of the concrete work being done on the Eastern Shore before heading out to the bridge. This is what they called a "cap."
One day, he yelled at what he saw on the Monster:
"Son of a bitch! You just dropped a cap overboard!"
Something had gone awry on a crane while it was moving a cap. The 40-ton block came out of a sling and plummeted past men on the rig. Foster, standing on an exposed walkway, watched it hit the water. For a split second, he saw clear to the bay's sandy bottom as it landed. The next moment, an enormous splash drenched him.
The sudden release of tension on the crane sent its boom snapping upward. A worker on the Monster's deck sprinted away, thinking he might have to jump clear of the rigging if the whole thing tipped.
The cap disappeared in the bottom, never to be found, but the Monster survived the scare. Afterward, the foreman, Bill Eskins, gathered his crew.
"Y'all are fired – including me," he growled.
The men ended their day at a bar, thinking their time on the project was over. But the company wanted them back. They returned the next morning.
Other accidents took lives, and at least one worker lost a hand. Two men were killed when a boiler exploded. Two more died when a boom on an island collapsed. Another was killed when a cable snapped and struck him. Yet another was electrocuted. The seventh death happened at a yard in Texas where the tunnel sections were cast.
Traversing narrow beams and other exposed structures required conflicting skills. Workers had to remain acutely aware of their footing but keep pace with the action around them.
Most returned day after day, season after season. Some did not.
One laborer, fresh from the Army, showed up for his first day with a buzz cut and camouflage fatigues. After the boat ride to his job site, he began to climb a ladder – and froze near the top.
Dunn, seeing that the man could not bring himself to finish the ascent or to come down, got on and pushed him up with his shoulders.
He never saw the worker return.
The Eastern Shore facing south, looking toward Fisherman Island and the north end of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
Watching the winds
In winter, the freezing air over the Chesapeake Bay formed ice where saltwater lapped against the concrete pilings. Frost gathered on mustaches and beards. Some workers stuffed newspaper in their clothes and placed plastic dry cleaner bags beneath their outerwear to ward off the wind.
Those who labored below ground were spared biting winds and frost-covered beards, unlike their brothers on the surface.
The North Channel Bridge off Fisherman Island had to be taller than the rest of the span to accommodate fishing boats and other bigger vessels.
Those who labored below ground in the islands found warmth from heat generated by new concrete as it cured. When two workers overturned in a small boat, they were fished out of the frigid water, given dry clothes and warmed beside the steam engine of a crane before returning to the job.
Fog sometimes enveloped the area. Purkey, the engineer from Missouri, once was with a boss on the Eastern Shore who wanted a local man to take them by boat to Fisherman Island so they could work there.
The boatman said it was too foggy to go: "I can't see no better than you can."
The men from the project pressed the fisherman until he agreed. They boarded his small boat and ventured into the mist. Their target was maybe a few hundred yards away.
After a while, their guide shut off his motor.
"We've been running too long," he said. "We shoulda hit that island by now."
He threw an anchor, and they waited for the fog to lift. When it did, they found themselves by a large ship in the bay's North Channel, on the far side of the island.
Despite Hurricane Carla, the first few yards of roadway and the first mile of pilings off Chesapeake Beach were complete on Sept. 11, 1961.
Crews began some days on calm water, unaware of a looming storm. The project's companies hired a private weather firm to help them spot trouble, but with widespread deployment of Doppler radar still decades away, the forecasts were of little help.
The construction team recorded changes in wind speed on an instrument at its yard. They found that work with floating equipment became impossible when winds blew stronger than 15 mph from the north or east.
Some storms seemed to churn up out of nowhere, and it could take an hour or more for tugs to tow the many barges along the 17-mile work zone to safety.
In September 1961, one year after construction began, Hurricane Carla toyed with two tunnel segments as they were being towed from their production plant in Texas 1,700 miles away. The airtight cylinders, 34 feet in diameter and loaded with 600 tons of steelwork, went adrift in the Gulf of Mexico. They were recovered days later, one after it washed up on a beach in Galveston.
In the Chesapeake Bay, waves washed out the gravel fill on one of the islands. A barge broke loose and struck the ferry Old Point Comfort.
October brought a storm that scattered several barges and dredges across the bay. A week later, seven workers were stranded overnight on an island when 5-foot waves kept boats from reaching them; they were rescued by a Navy helicopter at 9 a.m. the next day.
None of that could prepare the crews for what came next.
John W. Fowler was a project engineer working to build the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. His company hired Haycox Photoramic Inc. out of Norfolk to take photos of the ongoing work. This photo shows the Big D, a $1.5 million structure used to drive the pilings.
Jack her up a little more
In March, the East Coast was ravaged by one of the most powerful nor'easters of the century: the Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962.
Readings at the Little Creek yard measured gusts over 80 mph when the storm hit the Chesapeake. While most workers had been brought in, two stayed to watch over a $1.5 million pile-driving rig called the Big D; another tried to wait out the storm on the Monster.
The Big D was designed for the project, but its special talent was proving no match for the raging seas. The barge stood on four 100-foot steel legs that, in normal tides, allowed it to climb almost clear of the water using compressed-air jacks. That created a stable surface from which to drive pilings.
This nor'easter brought one of the highest storm tides on record. Some 5 miles from shore, Ernie Calhoun radioed in from a shelter on the Big D to Sam Liles, president of Tidewater Construction.
"Mr. Liles, I'm out of jacks and the seas are hitting the side of the barge."
"Just jack her up a little more, Cal," Liles said.
"I don't have any jacks left!" Calhoun yelled.
The rig weighed 1,650 tons, and it was losing its footing in the swells. The situation worsened near daybreak: Waves lifted the side of the barge like the edge of a table and slammed it down, over and over.
The legs snapped, and the Big D listed into the sea.
Calhoun and the other worker scaled the boom of a crane and wrapped their legs in the latticework, holding on to one of the last pieces of the rig that remained above water. A helicopter arrived and dropped a harness, but it caught on the boom and needed to be cut free. The men had to wait for the rescuers to return.
The second attempt was successful. Calhoun, his body cold and wet, was told they were being flown to Portsmouth Naval Medical Center. He told his rescuers to put him down at the nearest liquor store instead:
"I don't need no hospital."
Photo showing damage to one of the islands from the Ash Wednesday storm in 1962.
"Oh my lord ..."
The Ash Wednesday Storm caused $700,000 in damage to the Big D alone. Its crane was later recovered, but the barge was so buried in sand that it was left on the bay floor, where it remains.
For all the trouble weather caused during construction, the Chesapeake Bay also rewarded workers for their hardships.
"You'd give a million dollars for this view," a young engineer on one of the islands told a reporter one tranquil summer day.
Some workers fished during breaks or after their shifts, casting lines from the islands' rocks or dropping them from barges. The new underwater structures drew a bounty of spot, croaker, flounder and rockfish.
Dunn, a carpenter's apprentice, was told that only the blue-hatted inspectors were allowed to fish from the bridge, which by this time was far enough along that some workers could drive to their job sites. When his shift ended, Dunn went to his car and retrieved an inspector's hard hat he got from a friend, put his silver one in the trunk and grabbed his rod.
Though mindful of the dangers around them, the men operated in a pre-OSHA environment. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration – with its many workplace regulations and protections – did not exist until 1970.
To get to the islands, construction inspectors would board a barge, step onto the bucket of a crane and hold on while they were swung over the water and onto the rocks. Along the way, the operator might dip the inspector's feet in the water.
As the Monster's work neared the end, its men built a double-walled wooden chest, insulated it with sawdust and filled it with ice, beer and booze. After placing their last cap – No. 860 – the workers boarded a boat with the cooler and took a celebratory cruise around the project, waving goodbye to other crews.
Foster and another worker marked their last shift on the rig by tightening their life jackets and leaping from the top of one of its cranes.
At times, tense moments were broken by laughter.
Once, an excited superintendent, unaware that the mic on his radio was on, worried aloud when he saw a wayward barge drifting toward the bridge:
"Oh my lord, what shall I do!"
A voice from above crackled through radios across the job site: "Son, can I help you down there?"
It was a pilot from one of the menhaden spotter planes that circled over the bay in search of the fish. They used the same frequency as the bridge-tunnel crews.
The workers below roared.
Another time, a man's leg was crushed between a boat and a concrete piling as he tried to scale a ladder in rough water. He fell back onto the bow of the boat, screaming as others rushed to help him.
Then he sat up and laughed. The accident had taken only his wooden prosthetic leg.
Dean Dunn in his home in Norfolk, March 2014. Dunn worked on building the Bridge-Tunnel as a carpenter.
Job of a lifetime
The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel opened to traffic 43 months after construction began. When a parallel bridge was built in the late 1990s – no islands or tunnels were added – it took 39 months.
The builders of the original span moved on to other work, but their feat on the bay held a singular spot in their careers.
"It was without a doubt the best job I've ever been on in my life," said Purkey, who now runs a commercial roofing company in Memphis, Tenn.
Foster, the momentarily lost but hardworking teenager, went on to start Baymark Construction Corp. in Virginia Beach. He has built residential communities and golf courses, including Bay Creek Resort at Cape Charles, just across the bridge-tunnel.
He remains good friends with the foreman who cussed him out his first day on the Monster. Foster credits Eskins with helping shape his character, and he curses him when the arthritis from his old broken leg flares up.
Some men have acted as unofficial ambassadors of the span for the past half-century.
C.J. McCarty, a construction inspector on the project, talks about it once a year to fourth-graders at a school in Illinois where his daughter teaches. His own kids grew up looking at the slideshow presentations he gave to entertain guests at their home in the small town of Red Bud, Ill.
Both of his sons became engineers. The oldest, Jim, was born in Norfolk while McCarty was helping build the bridge-tunnel and returned in the 1990s to work on its expansion.
Others moved to Hampton Roads for the work and never left. Donna Corbus, one of three daughters born to Bill Sanders, a pile-driver on the span, was often asked when growing up in Ocean View, "Was your dad military?"
"No," she'd reply. "Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel."
Sanders died in 2008 at age 79. At the nursing home before his death, he enjoyed chatting up staffers, but his stories didn't start with his children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren. He wanted to tell them about the Bay Bridge-Tunnel.
Corbus has stacks of her father's black-and-white photos from those days. In one, Sanders is in his 30s again, wearing a hard hat and leather gloves. His left hand is on the handle of a large pipe wrench resting on a shoulder. In his right hand is a sledgehammer hanging at his side. Close in behind him are nine other men, their work shirts unbuttoned, a cigarette in one mouth.
And on their faces, smiles.
Bill Sanders, center, stands with other workers during construction of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. Sanders moved to Hampton Roads in 1961 from Niagara Falls, N.Y., to help build the span. He and his wife, Martha, stayed in the area the rest of their lives.
Epilogue
Months after the span opened, Foster drove to the project yard to carry out one of his last orders.
He entered the same offices where, three years earlier, he had arrived looking for work as a 17-year-old high school graduate. This time, the staff was gone, the furniture cleared out, the power cut off.
The rooms were mostly empty except for the trove of construction plans that had accumulated over four years. They were garbage now, copies of the originals. Foster was told to burn them.
He carried the rolls of paper outside, armful after armful, to barrels containing the fires he had lit. He dumped them at his feet and, picking up one at a time, unrolled each plan, stole a glance and stuck it into the flames.
He went on like this for an hour or two – unroll, look, burn – until a voice barked from behind him.
"Burn the damn plans. You're not going to find the Monster in there."
The supervisor, aware of Foster's connection to the rig, guessed correctly that he was searching for a keepsake. He also knew that if the young man carried on this way, it would be days before he was done.
Foster quit looking and hurried his pace.
He finished eight hours later.
Pilot researchers Jakon Hays and Maureen Watts contributed to this report.
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