In marine construction, according to A.W. McAfee, “You have
to develop a live skillset and be cross-functional in a lot of different
environments to really be an asset to a company. It’s that
well-rounded type of person who can do a structure in upstate
New York or the Indian Ocean – or now in Corpus Christi.”
McAfee has served as marine area superintendent/construction
manager with Bechtel Corporation in Texas since January
2015, where he is responsible for all marine construction operations,
including the LNG MOF and twin trestle/jetty, Bechtel’s
first self-performed marine/piling/drilled shaft works. Key to its
success is his development and management of the top-level team
required to complete the project.
“My team is driving over 350 concrete bearing piles and several
thousand feet of sheet wall,” he said. They are also constructing
the whaler and tie-back systems, and installing over 1,000 drilled
shafts between 20 and 140 feet deep, with diameters between 24
and 72 inches, via site-developed access roads and construction
barges.
The path that brought McAfee to Bechtel has been eclectic
and studded with impressive milestones. He originally trained as
a logistics co-ordinator with the Carson Long Military Institute
before receiving a degree in criminal justice/law enforcement from
Golden West College in California, pursuing studies in English literature
and attending the Divers Academy International.
He held positions as dive supervisor, commercial diver, pile
driver and deckhand with companies in the U.S. and Mexico before
being hired at Global Diving & Salvage, Inc., where he spent almost
a decade as marine superintendent.
One of his most notable achievements there was an extraordinary
project in the Delaware Aqueduct system, which provides
water to New York City. A landmark for the company, it required
dewatering of one of the shafts that accessed the aqueduct.
“It was actually 690 feet of water, and the shaft was 13.5
feet across,” said McAfee. “We went saturation diving inside that
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facility, made a lot of tactile measurements and then did a valve
replacement and installed a plug for the city so they could dewater
that shaft.”
He is also proud of a project at Cheesman Dam, a primary
reservoir for Denver Water.
“They have tunnels underwater that were built by early
America immigrants in the 1800s,” he said. “It was drilled and
blasted into carved-out tunnels; they didn’t have any gates.”
The project called for the replacement of three internal gate
valves with new hydraulic slide gates located on the upstream face
of the dam. In order to access the worksite for drilling and blasting,
divers carried out both surface and saturation dives from a barge
platform on the reservoir.
In 2013, McAfee moved to Leighton Contractors in Australia,
where he worked as marine superintendent, mainly on the $1.4-billion
Gorgon LNG Jetty and Marine Structures Project on Barrow
Island, 70 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia. It consisted
of a 2.2-kilometre jetty constructed of 70-metre steel trusses
on 55 concrete caissons leading to a loading platform that lies about
four kilometres offshore.
“We actually built it on a Class A nature reserve. It led to
many foundation challenges. We ballasted barges to offload
floating coffer cells, and then we lowered them onto the sea floor
that we’d prepped with rock and dropped the roadway and pipeline
trestle in 700-tonne modules,” said McAfee. “We did some piling
up there for some of the marine works and navigational beacons,
and it was really challenging with the environmental constraints
that we had, but that’s what keeps it interesting. That’s really the
heart and spirit.”
He counts himself lucky to have been involved in pioneering
projects.
“I was really fortunate when I was working for Global Diving
to take marine construction and specifically subsea construction
and salvage to places we’d never been,” he said. “None of these
By Sarah B. Hood
Leading the Charge
A.W. McAfee dives into pioneering projects
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