The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Concourse D expansion to creep across airfield
First prefab section will move this month in complex airport project.
In the dark hours of a night in late April, a giant prefab section of an airport concourse is set to be very slowly transported across the airfield of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
It’s part of a complex construction project designed to expand the airport’s Concourse D without shutting it down, allowing flight operations to continue.
Concourse D is the narrowest concourse of the world’s busiest airport, with crowded gate areas and congested corridors that passengers have to jostle through to get to their flights.
As passenger counts continue to grow, airport officials knew they had to expand. But they didn’t want to shut down the concourse to widen it.
Hartsfield-Jackson officials and contractors came up with a plan to prefab sections of the concourse expansion at a site near the airfield, and then transport them overnight to Concourse D.
Each piece will take about an hour to travel the 1-mile distance to the concourse from the construction site off Sullivan Road on the south side of the airfield.
The huge building section will sit atop a self-propelled modular transporter (SPMT) — a motorized platform on wheels. The vehicle moves at about 1 mph and is typically used to transport large things such as oil refinery equipment, bridge sections, roofs and other sections of buildings.
The route the SPMT will take has been carefully studied for slopes or changes in grade because it will be traversed by a low-riding vehicle carrying a section of a building about 40 feet tall, 30 feet wide and up to 192 feet long.
The transport of the first concourse piece is tentatively scheduled for the wee hours of April 24. By 1 a.m., flight operations slow to a trickle and the taxiways and runways on the south side of the airfield can be shut down to make way for the operation.
“We’ve got a window to move it from 1 a.m. to 4” in the morning, said Pete Pemantell, vice president of operations with Holder and project director for Holder-Moody-Bryson-Sovereign, the joint venture handling the Concourse D widening project. About 200 workers are involved in the project.
The contractors have spent months preparing, and have a detailed, minute-by-minute plan for preparation and the actual movement of the first 160-foot-long piece. The building section will have to go through security screening before it is transported onto the airfield.
The project to widen the concourse from 60 feet to 99 feet has already caused some disruption to travelers.
To prepare to attach the expansion pieces, the airport has closed eight gates on the north section of Concourse D for the first phase. Boarding bridges have been removed from the building and work has begun to remove the exterior surface of the building.
After each piece in the first phase is transported to the concourse site over a period of about five weeks, the sections will be attached to the working concourse like building blocks. Then the interior will be completed, to open the expansion. Six larger gates will reopen as construction shifts to another phase and another section of the concourse.
It will cost $1.3 billion and take until 2029 to complete all phases of the concourse expansion. Another $100 million is being spent on adding three gates to Concourse E to make up for D gates lost because of the work. The project received $40 million in federal funding from the federal bipartisan infrastructure law.
When it’s completed, Concourse D will actually end up with fewer gates. While there were previously 40 gates there, the new widened version will have just 34 gates. That’s because the airport wants to be able to handle more of the larger jets that airlines are shifting to, which also need more space to park.
President Joe Biden got a brief rundown of the project when Mayor Andre Dickens visited the White House earlier this year.
“Right now, we are expanding Concourse D,” Dickens told Biden in a video shared by Biden’s office.
Dickens took out a toysized model of the transport vehicle and said, “This thing here enables us to build it a mile away and then transport it in millimeter-like precision . ... So a big section of our airport is built offsite, and we roll it in here overnight and that way we can keep people working, keep the airport flowing and still be able to expand this concourse.”
“Well you know, it is the busiest airport in the world,” Biden said in the video. “The idea that you continue to expand, continue to modernize, continue to speed up transportation, is really important.”
Seeing the mayor and president talk about the project was “cool” and “really exciting,” Pemantell said. The diecast model Dickens showed to Biden came from the joint venture construction team.
There is some risk in such a massive undertaking. Inclement weather such as lightning or high wind could delay the plan.
Airport officials are planning to quietly carry out the first movement of a building section without the world watching, said Frank Rucker, senior deputy general manager of infrastructure at Hartsfield-Jackson.
“We want to make sure we get this right,” he said.
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION
Trillions of evolution’s bizarro wonders, red-eyed periodical cicadas that have pumps in their heads and jetlike muscles in their rears, are about to emerge in numbers not seen in decades and possibly centuries.
Crawling out from underground every 13 or 17 years, with a collective song as loud as jet engines, the periodical cicadas are nature’s kings of the calendar.
These black bugs with bulging eyes differ from their greener-tinged cousins that come out annually. They stay buried year after year, until they surface and take over a landscape, covering houses with shed exoskeletons and making the ground crunchy.
This spring, an unusual cicada double dose is about to invade a couple of parts of the United States in what University of Connecticut cicada expert John Cooley called “cicada-geddon.” The last time these two broods came out together in 1803 Thomas Jefferson, who wrote about cicadas in his Garden Book but mistakenly called them locusts, was president.
“Periodic cicadas don’t do subtle,” Cooley said.
If you’re fascinated by the upcoming solar eclipse, the cicadas are weirder and bigger, said Georgia Tech biophysicist Saad Bhamla.
“We’ve got trillions of these amazing living organisms come out of the Earth, climb up on trees and it’s just a unique experience, a sight to behold,” Bhamla said. “It’s like an entire alien species living underneath our feet and then some prime number years they come out to say hello.”
At times mistaken for voracious and unrelated locusts, periodical cicadas are more annoying rather than causing biblical economic damage. They can hurt young trees and some fruit crops, but it’s not widespread and can be prevented.
The largest geographic brood in the nation — called Brood XIX and coming out every 13 years — is about to march through the Southeast, having already created countless boreholes in the red Georgia
clay. It’s a sure sign of the coming cicada occupation. They emerge when the ground warms to 64 degrees, which is happening earlier than it used to because of climate change, entomologists said. The bugs are brown at first but darken as they mature.
The bug invasion will likely peak in May. Soon after the insects appear in large numbers in Georgia and the rest of the Southeast, cicada cousins that come out every 17 years will inundate Illinois. They are Brood XIII.
“You’ve got one very widely
distributed brood in Brood XIX, but you have a very dense historically abundant brood in the Midwest, your Brood XIII,” said University of Maryland entomologist Mike Raupp.
“And when you put those two together… you would have more than anywhere else any other time,” University of Maryland entomologist Paula Shrewsbury said.
These hideaway cicadas are found only in the eastern United States and a few tiny other places. There are 15 different broods that come out every few years, on 17and 13-year cycles. These two broods may actually overlap — but probably not interbreed — in a small area near central Illinois, entomologists said.
The numbers that will come out this year — averaging around 1 million per acre over hundreds of millions of acres across 16 states — are mind-boggling. Easily hundreds of trillions, maybe quadrillions, Cooley said.
An even bigger adjacent joint emergence will be when the two largest broods, XIX and XIV, come out together in 2076, Cooley said: “That is the cicada-palooza.”
The origin of some of the astronomical cicada numbers can likely be traced to evolution, Cooley and several other entomologists said. Fat, slow and tasty, periodical cicadas make ideal meals for birds, said Raupp, who eats them himself. (His school put out a cicada cookbook called “Cicada-Licious.” ) But there are too many for them to be eaten to extinction, he said.
“Birds everywhere will feast. Their bellies will be full and once again the cicadas will emerge triumphant,” Raupp said.
The other way cicadas use numbers, or math, is in their cycles. They stay underground either 13 or 17 years, both prime numbers. Those big and odd numbers are likely an evolutionary trick to keep predators from relying on a predictable emergence.
The cicadas can cause problems for young trees and nurseries when their mating and nesting weighs down and breaks branches, Shrewsbury said.
Periodical cicadas look for vegetation surrounding mature trees, where they can mate and lay eggs and then go underground to feast on the roots, said Mount St. Joseph University biologist Gene Kritsky, a cicada expert who wrote a book on this year’s dual emergence. That makes American suburbia “periodical cicada heaven,” he said.
It can be hard on the eardrums when all those cicadas get together in those trees and start chorusing. It’s like a singles bar with the males singing to attract mates, with each species having its own mating call.
“The whole tree is screaming,” said Kritsky, who created a Cicada Safari app to track where the cicadas are.
Cooley takes hearing protection because it can get so intense.
“It’s up in the 110 decibel range,” Cooley said. “It’d be like putting your head next to a jet. It is painful.”
The courtship is something to watch, Kritsky imitated the male singing “ffaairro (his pitch rising), ffaairro.”
“She flicks her wings,” Kritsky narrated in a play-byplay. “He moves closer. He sings. She flicks her wings. When he gets really close, he doesn’t have a gap, he’ll go ffaairro, ffaairro, ffaairro, fffaairo.”
Then the mating is consummated, with the female laying eggs in a groove in a tree branch. The cicada nymph will fall to the ground, then dig underground to get to the roots of a tree.
Cicadas are strange in that they feed on the tree’s xylem, which carry water and some nutrients. The pressure inside the xylem is lower than outside, but a pump in the cicada’s head allows the bug to get fluid that it otherwise wouldn’t be able to get out of the tree, said Carrie Deans, a University of Alabama Huntsville entomologist.
The cicada gets so much fluid that it has a lot of liquid waste to get rid of. It does so thanks to a special muscle that creates a jet of urine that flows faster than in most any other animal, said Georgia Tech’s Bhamla.
In Macon, T.J. Rauls was planting roses and holly last month when he came across a cicada while digging. A neighbor had already posted to social media an image of an early emerging critter.
Rauls named his own bug “Bobby” and said he’s looking forward to more to come.
“I think it will be an exciting thing,” Rauls said. “It will be bewildering with all their noises.”
Atlanta’s soccer fans may soon notice MARTA logos on the big screens at Mercedes-Benz Stadium after the transit agency’s board approved the plans for a large-scale branding partnership with Atlanta United.
Board members OK’d the details behind a deal that would be worth upwards of $586,000, including bigscreen logos, special merchandise, promotion across the team’s social media and even a MARTA ticket package.
Although approved by the MARTA board, the deal has yet to be finalized between the agency and the soccer team. Atlanta United declined comment until then.
MARTA officials said the new alliance aims to increase visibility among potential riders who might not always choose public transit for events.
Since the MLS team debuted in 2017, Atlanta
United games have drawn about 5.5 million fans over seven seasons, according to the team.
“We can increase our brand visibility among soccer fans and the broader
Atlanta community, reinforcing our presence as a key player in the city’s transportation landscape,” said Chinnette Cannida, director of marketing for MARTA.
The deal would extend
from this year through 2026. Either entity can opt out during the final year, officials said, as FIFA will likely play the primary role of determining sponsorship deals during the World Cup games hosted in Atlanta.
If the partnership is finalized, fans can expect flashes of MARTA’s multi-colored striped logo on both the 2,700-foot screen that wraps around the stadium and the 100-foot-tall “mega column” at the end of the field.
Atlanta United would use one match to promote a special MARTA ticket deal that includes a co-branded T-shirt and a special edition Breeze card. Fans can purchase the exclusive merchandise — ranging from T-shirts, hats and scarves — that will be sold at the stadium, Atlantic Station and online.
“We see this partnership as a major step towards establishing stronger connections with other local sports teams and event venues,” Cannida said. “It further allows us to forge a long-term collaborative relationship with Atlanta United as we all prepare for the World Cup in 2026.”
Another crucial element of the deal will be MARTA’s ability to use the likeness of four players on the team for promotional materials. Exactly who will be made available by Atlanta United has yet to be determined, the transit agency said Thursday.
MARTA Board Vice Chair Jennifer Ide called the sponsorship deal “great exposure” for the public transportation system.
“I think everything (Cannida) said about Atlanta United pulling the city together is so true,” she said during the board meeting. “This is one of those opportunities when people who may not otherwise ride MARTA do ride it regularly to the game.”
Efforts to increase MARTA ridership must also come alongside active steps to improve the system and prevent bottlenecks at stations located near large-scale events.
MARTA Board Member Jim Durrett pressed agency officials to be thoughtful about what increased ridership may mean for soccer fans.
“I think it’s really important that after the games, we do everything we can to have more frequent service so that people aren’t experiencing the sardine atmosphere or the inability to get on trains,” he said.