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ORD Next, the roughly $8.8 billion capital project that will completely transform Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, is a massive undertaking. You will see construction equipment there add two new halls and doubling the size of a new terminal at the airport.
Although the expansion will speed up traffic in the center, the busiest airport in the world for aircraft take-offs and landings – it represents a challenge for construction crews. They need to accomplish the colossal upgrade while minimizing disruption at O’Hare.
This is an issue that 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 types of builds: namely, don’t be afraid to ask questions, especially when you don’t know the answer.
Here, Baughman talks to Construction Dive about how the airport balances construction and the passenger experience, the work that went into preparing for it, and how disagreements can help builders deliver a successful project.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Construction Immersion: You have no construction background. What kind of perspective has that given you when looking at this project?
ZACH BAUGHMAN: I think it is advantageous.
If my team, or one of our contractors, can’t explain why we’re doing something to someone without construction knowledge, they probably don’t understand it enough themselves. They have to be able to translate everything to a non-builder, and it has to make sense.
It gives me a chance to challenge them.
I go into it with no ego because I’m not expected to know some of these specific engineering decisions, and I can question pretty freely and get a lot of information that way.
I certainly encourage healthy disagreement within the team, especially if it comes from a non-constructive environment. I value having many different opinions to weigh before making decisions.
I actively encourage, in meetings and discussions, “Someone tell me otherwise. Someone disagrees with this point. Why is this not true? What else should we think?”
I think this is useful for reaching consensus in a large group. Everyone has been heard, we’ve made those decisions, and now we’ve landed on a path forward.
How does O’Hare Airport balance construction while operating as a busy airport?
It’s a lot of coordination with our airlines, with the Transportation Security Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration when we’re affecting the FAA’s safety lanes and movement area.
Zach Baughman
Permit granted by Chicago Department of Aviation
We are just over a year into the construction of the new hall D. This construction site is about 88 acres in the middle of our airfield, and we were able to do it without having any FAA pavement closures.
We did this through years of preparation. We thought the sequencing very well. Although the construction of the building started only a year ago, the enabling works for this construction started in 2018.
We’ve spent time moving the taxiways around to make sure we can always maintain specific routes for airlines to get in and out of the terminal core, all before we take the actual construction site and start building.
Can you give me an example?
Right now, we have two temporary taxiways west of the construction site that are operational. They are currently called Tango and Romeo. They didn’t exist before this summer.
By examining our type of construction sequencing, our building height will increase enough that the FAA will lose line of sight to the previously existing taxiways. We discussed with our airlines that we would potentially lose access to these roads.
Together, we were able to allocate some of our federal funding, some other funding from previously approved projects, add some additional money for an interim condition, and create two interim taxiways so we could keep planes flowing just west of our construction site.
Directly west of one of our taxiways is a central detention basin. Previously, there were 600 cubic meters of rainwater retention area. When ORD Next is complete, there will be two new taxiways crossing the top of this central detention basin.
One enabling project is to fill the central detention basin with soil that we are actually excavating from the Concourse D site to allow the taxiways to be paved.
The problem is that you can’t just lose 600,000 cubic meters of rainwater retention. This has to go somewhere. So we’re simultaneously expanding our southern detention basin by that cubic meter, excavating it.
But the other problem is that stormwater doesn’t just appear in the southern detention basin. You have to direct it there through a series of drains that we have under the airfield.
So we’re filling in the central detention basin, expanding the south detention basin, and just last year we completed a one-and-a-half-mile tunnel from that old central detention basin to the 14-and-a-half-foot diameter south detention basin that was dug under the airfield during active airfield operations.
What has this project taught you about construction that you didn’t know before?
How critical is the communication aspect.
I think it’s tempting for construction teams to operate in a silo and build what they’re supposed to build, because they understand how to do it. These men and women are experts in this type of work.
What makes or breaks the project is how well we’ve translated to our stakeholders what the impacts will be, how prepared they are to manage those impacts, have contingency plans when things go wrong, how others in the department understand the work we’re doing, and how their day-to-day jobs will change because of that work.
And then, how does the public understand why this is an important project for the region, why it’s an important project for the country, for the national airspace.
I wouldn’t have thought going into this job that the communication part is really key to a successful delivery.
