The Port of Long Beach continues to invest $2.4 billion over the next decade in its capital program, increasing dock rail capacity, upgrading port structures and preparing for a planned dredging effort.
One of the port’s tenants is stepping in by financing a nearly $400 million effort to fill in an unused south slip to create 19 acres of new land, while building a 3,400-foot continuous dock to accommodate large container ships; sea port
When the Pier G south pier infill project is completed in late 2027, the terminal will have three continuous berths totaling 3,400 feet. “This will give us better operational flexibility. It will allow us to handle two of the largest container ships in the world at the same time, something we cannot do today with our current docks,” says Ross, with Halftonr’s international shipping service office. “Filling this buffer will increase our capacity much more than just the physical land. It will optimize our traffic layout, our traffic flow.”
While the project only adds about 19 acres to the port’s 256 total acres, it’s about how it affects its broader logistics, Ross says. “[That 19 acre lot] not even 10% of additional land, but it has the potential to increase our total terminal capacity by up to 50%.”
The ITS terminal currently handles around 1 million 20-foot equivalent unit (TEU) containers. The Port of Long Beach has said that by 2050 it will need to increase its overall capacity by 100%.
“It’s going to be difficult to do with the existing constraints,” says Darren Lamberger, the port’s former director of construction management. He is now the Southern California construction management and field services leader for HDR, leading the design of the port’s $1.5 billion Pier B rail facility. “One of the ways we do that is by bringing in bigger ships. As we’ve grown, we’re filling in these smaller links to make bigger docks, to bring in bigger ships that have much more capacity, bigger cranes and faster cargo movement.”
Dock filling in progress
A joint venture of Griffith Co. and The Dutra Group won a $358 million contract in 2025 from ITS to build the Pier G Infill project, with Griffith handling Dutra’s land and water. “It originally had a higher value, but through value engineering and working closely with our client, we were able to value it,” says Ryan Aukerman, president of Griffith. “We went in and tore down the old pier that went through it [horseshoe-shaped] slide and this will allow us to fill the water part with a rock dike, shielding stone and new piles.”
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The demolition of 3,000 linear feet of pier included the removal and recycling of 1,500 tons of steel and 40,000 m3 of concrete. It also included 10,342 cubic meters of crushed miscellaneous base, 19,000 cubic meters of asphalt, 15,000 cubic meters of concrete and 28,319 cubic meters of ground infrastructure such as docks. About 2.5 million cubic meters of material from within the complex and from Newport Beach will help fill the southern slide.
Last year, crews began installing underground facilities such as storm drains and bioretention filters, Aukerman adds. Then they started grading the bottoms back into service as they continued to fill the sheet. “After all the rock dike is at the right level, we’ll put the dirt in with a surcharge and let it sit for six months.”
The dike includes about 487,000 tons of rock, 1,792,500 cubic meters of dredged fill and will use about 485,000 cubic meters of backfill material, with about 5.4 million linear feet of wick drains. “One of the biggest challenges is the electrical requirement for dredging,” says Brian O’Sullivan, COO of The Dutra Group. “We had to build a new crane to be able to do that. We have tugs, we have our full ‘Morty.’ [1,054-gross-ton] boat out there with the [Lieber 8300] electric crane on top”.
Crews will drive about 381 piles up to 105 feet to support the new pier and its 560-foot extension, which will use 8,300 cubic meters of concrete and about 3 million pounds of steel.. Completion is scheduled for the end of 2027.
Crews will install thousands of linear feet of several new utilities, including 75 storm drainage structures and five storm treatment units. The main ones include a 72-inch diameter outlet pipe about 1,900 feet long and a 48-inch pipe about 1,400 feet long. “We were running both lines simultaneously, so whenever we had a high tide on one side, luckily for us on the 48-inch side it wasn’t as bad as on the 72-inch side,” says Luis Baeza, the joint venture’s underground field superintendent.
Paving operations will include a 17-inch-thick cement-treated base section, with an 11-in. section for the “backlands” storage and storage area behind the wharf. “Then we’ll put seven inches of pavement on top” of the footing, says Joe Caratini, Griffith’s project superintendent. “We’re going to have a batch plant on site for our cement treated base. Once the backfill is complete, “we’re going to start extending our base and then we’re going to set up a pug mill. And once they start mixing and we finish our grading, we’ll start to import that base and put it in front and do our grading.” The approximate size of the paving area is 20 hectares, he adds.
The team is using three proprietary devices to treat water and capture runoff: PerkFilters, a three-chamber system with cartridges that remove solids, debris and pollutants; a high-flow biopod stormwater treatment system; and CDS units, a hydrodynamic separator that captures trash, debris, sediment and oil or grease from stormwater runoff through continuous deflective separation with an integrated oil deflector, says Mercy Canul, project manager for the underground division. “We’ll be installing four different systems with 16 registration fences” for the biopods, he says, adding that the team is installing 10 PerkFilters and 13 CDS units.
Working with tides and traffic
The biggest challenge so far has been the unknowns,” says Matthew Arroyo, Griffith Project Manager. “It was evident on this project when we started digging our drain line and discovered an unexploded ordinance.” An unexploded ordinance was found in 2025, followed by a spent casing this February. “Once we found the ordinance, we had to reach out to the authorities to really understand what it was and understand the impact it could have on the work,” says Arroyo. Experts have been guiding the team in protocols to deal with the risk.
A slightly more predictable risk is tides, whose fluctuations affect operations such as pipeline installation. The team reviews the tide charts daily to adjust work activities accordingly. “As the weeks go by, you really control the different tide tables and you can plan the work where you know you can do it, and you have alternate work you can do it with when you can’t,” Arroyo says. Crews still have to deal with unpredictable winds, heavy marine traffic and terminal traffic.
The team works closely with ITS on site access and devises ways to save or modify schedules. “Having a construction site in the middle of a working container terminal is not ideal for any party,” says Ross. “We handle up to 3,000 container trucks a day, so we don’t need a lot of extra traffic on the road. [original] the intention was to bring everything to the water’s edge, but that too is complicated, takes more time and potentially costs more too. So we worked with our contractors to find windows. When they can come in with deliveries, say for example all the stacks, instead of bringing them in by barge, we allow them to come in on flatbed trucks. We work with them on what time of day it won’t interfere with our operations.”
“Given the heavier equipment and the harbor that has the right of way, that’s always difficult, especially when you’re trying to meet the demands of the project,” says Danny Cortez, Griffith’s corporate security manager. “We try to coordinate these efforts ahead of time. One simple way is to use beacons with two-way radio communication.”
Arroyo also notes an advantage of working inside a busy container terminal. “We’re lucky to have a project that gives us a safe job site with a K-lane and fences,” he says. “The harbor is a safe place where you know we don’t have to deal with some of the typical challenges of a construction site.”
