Dry Dock 3 at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard was poured in 1942, under wartime pressure. It still holds water. It still pumps out. It still works exactly as designed. And it can no longer be used, because today’s Virginia-class submarines are too long for it and too heavy for its floor. You cannot stretch a dry dock. Its walls hold back a harbor and its floor stops the sea from pushing the whole structure upward when it is empty. So in March 2023, NAVFAC Pacific awarded a $2.8 billion task order — the largest in the command’s history — to the Dragados / Hawaiian Dredging / Orion joint venture to replace it outright with a new graving dock: Dry Dock 5. 657 feet long, 100 feet wide, 55 feet deep, designed to last 150 years. This is what that money actually buys: a cofferdam built from steel piles seven feet in diameter driven 150 feet down, 72 anchor piles reaching 210 feet below the water li

Source: The Navy Is Digging a $2.8 BILLION Hole in Pearl Harbor — Here’s Why