Dome is Odd Home for Carnival Cruise Line’s $40 Million Terminal

By Greg Aragon

The Queen Mary has company.

With the April opening of Carnival Cruise Lines’ $40 million terminal, the historic ocean liner is joined in the Port of Long Beach by two modern megaships: Carnival’s Elation and Ecstasy.

The Long Beach Cruise Terminal at the Queen Mary includes a new passenger terminal with a baggage-handling area and an INS/customs facility built within the dome that formerly housed the Spruce Goose airplane. Other components of the project included the installation of a 300-ft. passenger gangway extending from dome to ship; a cruise berth capable of handling 1,000-ft.-long vessels with a 28-ft. draft; 1,000-ft. pier; 1,400-space parking structure; and central plant.

“Carnival Cruise Lines is going to be a great marketing opportunity for the city,” said Reggie Harrison, deputy city manager for Long Beach. “We would expect an economic impact for the first year of about $4 million.”

Harrison said that the terminal is expected to attract between 300,000 and 500,000 travelers a year to the city and employ a seasonal job force of about 150 workers per ship in port.

Managed by the Monterey Park office of general contractor Kajima Construction Services, the project is the result of an agreement between Carnival Corp. and Queen’s Seaport Development Inc., which holds a long-term sublease on the Queen Mary and surrounding property.

The project’s centerpiece is a huge white geodesic dome. Built 20 years ago by Gardena-based Temcor Inc. to house eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes’ giant wooden aircraft, the structure has been relatively empty since the plane was hauled to Oregon in 1992.

Building within the confines of the dome was difficult because of its size (120,000 sq. ft.) and composition, said Mark Turner, Kajima’s senior project manager.

“First of all, the dome itself is an aluminum structure with fiberglass panels,” Turner added. “And we had to introduce structural steel, concrete decks and drywall.”

He said inserting these materials was tough because, depending on wind force, the dome could have significant movement.

Capt. Mike Kaczmarek, project manager for Carnival, said that the uniqueness of the dome created the need for new construction solutions.

“There’s not a great deal of them in the country,” the retired naval captain said. “And there’s not a huge reservoir of experience when it comes to these aluminum geodesic domes.”

To overcome the new terrain, Turner said engineers built models and took wind-load measurements for dome movement.

Achieving blanket fire protection inside the 114-ft.-high structure also tested the project team.

“The dome does not fall comfortably under any code in terms of fire protection,” Kaczmarek said. “So we ended up doing a fairly sophisticated sequence of fire-system development and modeling to develop a system that made sense within this particular structure.”

Turner said that with help from fire-protection subcontractor Gage Babcock of Anaheim and the Long Beach Fire Department, the project team decided to introduce a combination of fire sprinklers, preaction systems and laser technology throughout the dome.

“Through a series of expansion joints, we were able to achieve fire ratings for the occupied areas of Carnival as well as maintain integrity to the dome structure itself,” Turner said.

To construct the pier, about 15,000 yds. of material had to be dredged so that ships could enter and dock. Kajima used a 200,000-lb. diesel hammer positioned on a barge to hammer 24-in. concrete piles 60 ft. into the ocean floor.

When stubborn bedrock at the sea bottom was encountered at the pier’s north end, contractors switched to 36-in. steel-pipe piles that Turner said “acted like a cookie-cutter, slicing through the bedrock.” The steel piles provided the proper amount of bending and motion that was needed, Turner added.

Security was also a major concern. The project was barely a month old when terrorists struck on the East Coast on Sept. 11, 2001.

“We already had a design under construction,” said Kaczmarek, who joined Carnival five years ago. “And we went into a post-Sept. 11 world and had a change in direction from the immigration and customs people that significantly altered and upgraded their requirements.”

Turner called the new security requirements “ever-changing” and difficult to keep up with. He said that the implementation of additional cameras, border fences, secure areas, lighting and baggage equipment such as X-ray machines added about $1 million to the job.

Kaczmarek said that even before Sept. 11, the Carnival terminal was already the most state-of-the-art terminal design for customs and INS in the United States. “So we went from state of the art to new state of the art,” he added.

Click here for more Features >>