WHOI To Construct New Waterfront Complex
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is gearing up to announce its newest project initiative, the Complex for Waterfront Access to Exploration and Research, or CWATER for short.
The project consists of three main components: a newly designed dock, a new waterfront facility and a public green space. The current Iselin Marine Facility, erected in 1969, is two years past its 50-year expiration date, and with sea levels steadily rising, replacement had to be both innovative and adaptable. The new facility will be a modern waterfront hub for marine exploration and research and is intended to support WHOI’s position as an anchor institution of oceanographic studies for the next century.
“I think people visualize ships, but it’s ships plus autonomous vehicles, plus testing of equipment, putting sensors in the water, observing the ocean, diving, all of the things that enable the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to do its business,” said Robert S.C. Munier, vice president of marine facilities and operations. “We need to have access to the sea, and this is our launchpad for that. It’s not just a building; it’s the infrastructure associated with being able to bring our ships in and do all of those things.”
A minor but notable piece of this project is what Mr. Munier called “optimization of activities,” meaning that they are taking inventory of all the programs going on at their waterfront facility, keeping the essential ones, and relocating ones that are less reliant on waterfront activity to the Quissett campus.
“We’re focusing on the new facility to have just those things that absolutely have to be on the waterfront,” Mr. Munier said. “To be more specific, we have the Alvin high bay in the current facility, which is an important resource. High bays are things where you have large garage doors, high ceilings, overhead cranes, and the ability to directly access the dock, so that you can put things either on a ship or into the water. In fact, the Alvin submersible is in the high bay right now, finalizing a yearlong refit and upgrade. And that type of resource, these high bay facilities, are very important and have evolved to become essential to provide this access to the sea. In the new facility, we envision having additional high bays similar to the Alvin high bays.”
Since 2017, WHOI has conducted two feasibility studies, one of which was a basic prerequisite of a project like this. The second one, however, was a deeper dive focusing on the differences in proposed designs for the dock. This second study birthed three different dock designs that were brought before the select board last July, and although WHOI has yet to finalize and implement the new design, all of them were designed with the study’s results in mind: each is adaptable and able to withstand rising sea levels of up to four feet over the next 50 to 80 years.
“[Rising sea levels are] a significant concern, one that we have spent a lot of time and effort on to provide the context for designing a new facility that has to be on the waterfront,” Mr. Munier said. “The essence of what we do is going out to sea, and access to the sea is a prerequisite to do that. We can’t abandon the need to do that, so that kind of puts us in the position of developing a facility that has the foresight of anticipating sea level rise. What we have done is engage subject matter experts on this topic, both within WHOI and external consultants, to study the problem and to use that to provide the underpinning for our long-range planning.”
Because the facilities straddle both the land and the dock, Mr. Munier explained that any dock project they take on has some semblance of a building project piggybacked off of it.
“That puts us in a position of having to rethink the way the buildings are and the functions that go on there,” he said. “One caveat that we are exploring the possibility of is including some public space in a new building that would provide a portal into what we do here, which we think would be a valuable contribution to understanding the ocean, fun, and just provide a mechanism for communicating what we do over and above what we do now. It’s very early in our thinking and we’ve developed some preliminary ideas… A lot of it is going to come down to fundraising, our ability to afford that capability in addition to the daily business we have to do in the new building.”
Aside from a few grants, most of the money for the project comes from federal funding, with the rest trickling in through state funds and private philanthropic donations. Mr. Munier called fundraising an “all of the above approach” to the CWATER project.
“Fundraising is going to be a really important part of being able to implement the project,” he said. “We are focused on trying to have a project that would be shovel-ready, which is a term that’s used to imply that you’ve got a good enough design that you could then initiate construction if you’ve raised the funds to implement it. Our target would be the middle of next year to be in that phase where we’d be ready to initiate a project.”
Although the project has been in the planning stage since 2018, it will still take years to implement.
“We’re now at a 30 percent stage of design toward that long-range goal of getting to a shovel-ready 100 percent design for the middle of next year,” Mr. Munier said. “It’s a significant effort. We’re at the completion of a conceptual design phase and schematic designs, and then you go into design development and then you go into construction documents and those are going to take well into the second quarter of next year. It’s important for WHOI and we’re really doing all the steps you’d want to do in a very focused way.”