Major in-water construction has begun on a new dry dock at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, where the projected date for completion is early 2028.

“We’re at this point where we’re about to drive foundational piles that essentially anchor the dry dock,” said Capt. Stephen Padhi, commanding officer, Officer-in- Charge of Construction Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. “It’s a steel shoring wall that’s really going to outline, essentially, the footprint of the new dry dock. That shoring wall is going to be the scheduled driving activity for the next year.”

The $3.4 billion project, spearheaded by joint venture Dragados/Hawaiian Dredging/Orion, or DHO JV, under contract with the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, or NAVFAC, will completely replace the shipyard’s Dry Dock 3, which is unable to support the Navy’s more advanced Virginia-class submarines or larger surface ships and will shut down once the Navy retires the last of its Los Angeles-class submarines.

“Our Dry Dock 3 is very shallow, and to maintain our capacity as we switch between Los Angeles-class submarines, which are reaching their end of life, over to the Virginia-class submarines, which are continuing to be built up by the Navy. Dry Dock 3 is too small and too shallow to accept the Virginia-class submarines,” Capt. Richard Jones, commander of the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, said. “We need to have a new dry dock built that’s a bit deeper and a bit longer to accept those submarines and help us maintain the fleet ready to go.”

Dry Dock 5 will allow the shipyard to maintain its capacity and capability, a priority of the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Program, a $21 billion venture established by the Navy to increase naval capability through upgraded shipyard layouts and equipment replacements across the country.

“Our program looks at three lines of effort,” said Joanna Victorino, SIOP department director. “The first one is dry docks and wet berths; our second one is where we really look at optimizing our waterfront; and our third one is modernizing our equipment.”

In 2018 the Navy conducted a study on dry dock capability and capacity, looking at how many dry docks were necessary in each of its four public shipyards.

“To maintain the number of Virginia-classes we have in Pearl Harbor, we do need all four dry docks to be at full capacity for a number of years in the future, to keep them maintained correctly,” Jones said. “In the future our workload will require that we have all four dry docks, and if we don’t have Dry Dock 5, what that would mean is we couldn’t maintain the submarines like we need to, so we would have to postpone that maintenance.”

Dry Dock 5 is the first dry dock being built at Pearl Harbor since 1943, and has a target of 150 years of service.

“We’ve built (it) for re­silience. We’ve included everything that is required to make it a complete and usable dry dock,” Padhi said.

The dry dock will include all of the facilities necessary to operate, including a chilled water system, dewatering pump houses, a water treatment system and additional power feeds. The team also increased the top deck of the dry dock by almost four feet, accounting for climate change and sea level rise, and adding cranes and crane rails to account for vertical differences between it and the shipyard’s other dry docks.

The new dry dock will be constructed next to the existing Dry Dock 3 — a location that Padhi said is fortunate in relation to the construction process.

“If it were smack dab in the middle of the shipyard, it would make this even more expensive and more challenging. What we’ve been able to do even prior to the main construction effort is we were able to enclave off the project site from the controlled industrial area, and that is a significant help to DHO JV to bring in their workforce,” Padhi said.

A temporary logistics site was established on Waipio Peninsula, which is about a mile from the work zone across the navigational channel that leads into Pearl Harbor, which will minimize impacts on shipyard operations and the surrounding area.

“It also was designed based on geography that we have to minimize the travel across the roads, so we’re not taking 2,500 concrete trucks over the roads, increasing the traffic and damaging the roads with a heavy load,” Jones said. “That was part of the design of the plan: to come up with how to move the very heavy materials around to not only not disrupt my shipyard operations, but also to minimize the impact on the local highways and the local traffic.”

It is the Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command’s largest construction project to date by dollar value.

“For what the Navy needs to modernize and how long it’s been, we’ve deferred a lot of investment for a once-in-a-generation type of effort,” Padhi said.

The design for the project was completed in late summer 2022, and NAVFAC awarded the contract to DHO JV for the project last March. In-water construction began on the project in August.

The installation of the shoring wall will be commemorated Feb. 24 at an Anchoring Ceremony. Once it is completed, dredging is expected to continue through 2026. The team expects that in March 2027 all of the critical facilities of the dry dock will be in place, allowing for nonconstruction activities required to make the dry dock ready, until its anticipated completion in January 2028.

For decades the Navy bought new vessels and weapons, but now requires construction and maintenance for facilities necessary to keep the upgraded equipment working. In 2021 a Government Accountability Office report said upgrades were needed to Pearl Harbor Shipyard facilities to accommodate repair of battle-damaged ships in the event of an armed conflict in the Pacific.

“We’re a strong piece of the (Indo-Pacific Command) and the Pacific Fleet, and of accomplishing their overall strategies,” Jones said. “Our portion of that is to keep the ships and submarines maintained and to be ready to do any recovery.”

The project will also create approximately 2,500 jobs through its anticipated completion date. According to the environmental impact statement, the project is expected to bring an “overall positive economic effect during construction.” Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard is the state’s largest industrial employer, with over 6,000 employees.

As construction continues on the new dry dock, Padhi said the project’s main focus is creating the infrastructure necessary for the shipyard to be successful, which translates into success for the Navy as a whole.

“It’s very easy to get focused on the material, means and methods, and contracting, but in the end it’s really not about those things. It’s about giving the multigenerational workforce here at the shipyard the infrastructure they need to be successful,” Padhi said. “Their success translates to fleet success and being able to have the critical, crucial forward presence that our nation needs with the attack submarine force in the Indo-Pacific region, to preserve our way of life. That’s really what it is truly about.”