Concrete plans

Huh, well, it's at the bottom of Tyler Bridges's article but I think this is a good place to start with this story.

The terminal was supposed to open in May 2018, in time for Landrieu to inaugurate it just before he left office. The cost initially was $650 million.

Airport officials announced the latest delay in April, pushing back the latest planned opening from May to the fall. It was the fourth announced delay. The terminal and new roadways are projected to cost $1.3 billion. Airline passengers and state and federal funds are paying most of the tab.

Landrieu and the Aviation Board went forward with the new terminal without concrete plans on how people would get there from New Orleans.

Yeah see the airport is still not open. But I don't think the problem with the roadways, or the airport itself, is lack of concrete.  In fact, it might be they're trying to pour too much of it. In a big swamp. Which is an engineering challenge even when you aren't cutting corners to get the thing up and running in time for a photo op. This isn't to say that's what's wrong here. Or at least, it doesn't have to be the only thing wrong.  But when you get stuff like this happening, you have to wonder a little bit.

Spann said rapid sinking of the soil caused a massive sewage main to shift a year ago, leaving it inoperable. That added more than $7 million to the cost of the project, admittedly, a small fraction of the total building cost, but it was the reason officials pushed back the grand opening to last February. It was later delayed again to May and now, to an unspecified date this fall.

In June, the airport released a promotional video on its website highlighting the work that was being done to get the project across the finish line.

“It's really a lot of the finishes, testing. Getting a lot of the systems testing. Getting the fire alarm to go through,” said the project’s Construction Manager Charlie Prewitt in the video. But the promotion didn’t mention the continued problems with the plumbing. The smaller, lateral pipes that connect the toilets, for example, to the newly-repaired sewage main had broken in at least a hundred places.

To try and find the root of the problem, multiple sources working on the construction at the airport said large, exploratory holes have been carved into the concrete foundation of the new terminal building so that crews can access the sewage pipes. The main contractor, a powerhouse joint venture of four large companies, Hunt-Gibbs-Boh-Metro, ran video inspections through the sewage laterals to try and find all of the breaks.

“It's more of an annoyance than it is a serious situation,” Spann said.

They're not saying at the moment that the "annoyance" will cause any new delays.  But then, since there's no opening date set at the moment, how would we even know?