ORD Next, the approximately $8.8 billion capital project that will completely transform Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, is a massive undertaking. It will see construction crews add two new concourses and double the size of a new terminal at the airport.
Although the expansion will streamline traffic through the hub — the busiest airport in the world by airplane takeoffs and landings — it presents a challenge for construction crews. They need to pull off the colossal upgrade while minimizing disruptions at O’Hare.
That’s a problem Zach Baughman, chief development officer and managing deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Aviation, has thought long and hard about.
Baughman, who is a lawyer, not a contractor, has approached the project with a unique perspective. He has some advice for builders who are working on these kinds of builds: Namely, don’t be afraid to ask questions, especially when you don’t know the answer.
Here, Baughman talks with Construction Dive about how the airport balances construction and passenger experience, the legwork that went into preparation and how disagreements can help builders deliver a successful project.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: You don’t have a construction background. What kind of vantage point has this given you when looking at this project?
ZACH BAUGHMAN: I think it's advantageous.
If my team, or if one of our contractors, can't explain why we're doing something to someone without a construction background, then they probably don't understand it sufficiently enough themselves. They need to be able to translate everything to a non-construction person, and it has to make sense.
It gives me the opportunity to challenge them.
I walk into it without any ego because I'm not expected to know some of these specific engineering decisions, and can question pretty freely and get a lot of information that way.
I certainly encourage healthy disagreement within the team, especially coming from a non-construction background. I value having many different opinions to weigh before we make decisions.
I actively encourage, in meetings and discussions, “Someone tell me the opposite of this. Someone disagree with this point. Why would this be untrue? What else should we be thinking through?”
I think that's helpful in ultimately reaching consensus within a large group. Everyone's been heard, we've hashed out these decisions and now we've landed on a path forward.
How does O’Hare Airport maintain the balance of performing construction while operating as a busy airport?
It’s a ton of coordination with our airline partners, with the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration when we're impacting security lanes and the movement area for the FAA.
We're just over a year into construction on the new Concourse D. That construction site takes up about 88 acres in the middle of our airfield, and we've been able to do that without having any closures of FAA pavement.
We did that through years of preparation. We thought through the sequencing very carefully. Although construction on the building only began a year ago, enabling work for that construction began in 2018.
We've spent time moving taxiways to make sure that we can always maintain specific routes for the airlines to get in and out of the terminal core, all before we ever took the actual construction site and started building.
Can you give me an example?
Right now, we have two interim taxiways just west of the construction site that are operational. They're currently called Tango and Romeo. Those didn't exist prior to this summer.
In looking through our kind of construction sequencing, the height of our building is going to get tall enough that the FAA is going to lose the line of sight to the previously existing taxiways. We discussed that with our airlines, that we were potentially going to lose access to these taxiways.
Together, we were able to allocate some of our federal funding, some other previously approved projects funding, add a bit of additional money for an interim condition and create two interim taxiways so that we could keep aircraft flowing just to the west of our construction site.
Directly west of one of our taxiways is a central detention basin. Previously, it was 600 cubic yards of stormwater retention area. When ORD Next is complete, there will be two new taxiways that traverse over the top of that central detention basin.
One enabling project is filling in the central detention basin with soil that we're actually excavating out of the Concourse D site to allow the taxiways to be paved over that.
The problem is you can't just lose 600,000 cubic yards of stormwater retention. That has to go somewhere. So we're simultaneously expanding our south detention basin by that cubic yardage, digging it out.
But then the other problem is the stormwater doesn't just appear in the south detention basin. You have to direct it there through a series of drains that we have under the airfield.
So, we're filling the central detention basin, expanding the south detention basin, and then, just last year, we completed a mile and a half long tunnel from that former central detention basin to the south detention basin, 14-and-a-half feet in diameter that was dug under the airfield all during active airfield operations.
What has this project taught you about construction that you didn’t know before?
How absolutely critical the communication aspect is.
It’s tempting, I think, for construction teams to operate in a silo and build what they're supposed to build, because they understand how to do that. These men and women are experts in this kind of work.
What makes or breaks the project is how well we've translated to our stakeholders what the impacts are going to be, how prepared they are to manage through those impacts, to have contingency plans when things go wrong, how well others in the department understand what the work is we're doing and how their day-to-day jobs are going to change because of that work.
And then, how well the public understands why this is an important project for the region, why it's an important project for the country, for the national aviation space.
I would not have thought coming into this job that the communications piece of it is really key to successful delivery.
