The Baytown Tunnel or Baytown – La Porte Tunnel was a two-lane underwater motor-vehicle

tunnel A tunnel is an underground passageway, dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, and enclosed except for the entrance and exit, commonly at each end. A pipeline is not a tunnel, though some recent tunnels have used immersed tube cons ...

connecting

Baytown Baytown may refer to: * Baytown, Texas, a city in the United States near Houston, Texas *Baytown culture, an archaeological culture in the United States *Operation Baytown Operation Baytown was an Allied amphibious landing on the mainland o ...

and La Porte, two suburbs of

Houston Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...

. Completed in 1953, it traveled northeast-southwest underneath the

Houston Ship Channel The Houston Ship Channel, in Houston, Texas, is part of the Port of Houston, one of the busiest seaports in the world. The channel is the conduit for ocean-going vessels between Houston-area terminals and the Gulf of Mexico, and it serves an incr ...

and had a length of . It was closed to vehicular traffic in 1995 with the opening of the Fred Hartman Bridge, and subsequently demolished beginning in 1997 in order for the

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers , colors = , anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day) , battles = , battles_label = Wars , website = , commander1 = ...

to deepen the channel in 1998. The Fred Hartman Bridge had been designed to replace the Baytown Tunnel (of depth clearance ), which had to be removed when the

was deepened to , with a minimum bottom width, to accommodate larger ships. The last section of the Baytown Tunnel was removed on September 14, 1999, with removal of the tunnel being the responsibility of the

Texas Department of Transportation The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT ) is a government agency in the American state of Texas. Though the public face of the agency is generally associated with the construction and maintenance of the state's immense state highway system ...

. "Welcome to the Houston-Galveston Navigation Channel Project Online Resource Center" (description),

USACE , colors = , anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day) , battles = , battles_label = Wars , website = , commander1 = ...

, December 2005, webpage:
USACE-HGNC
.

History

Conceived and constructed as a means to improve traffic circulation, the tunnel opened in September 1953 as a replacement facility for the now-defunct Morgans Point Ferry at a final cost of $10 million. The land where the tunnel entered and exited was leased from

Exxon ExxonMobil Corporation (commonly shortened to Exxon) is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and was formed on November 30, ...

by the state for an annual fee of $1. The tunnel consisted of prefabricated sections that were sunk into place on the floor of the channel. The completed facility had a diameter of complete with a steel shell with of concrete lining. The actual roadbed inside was flat with a ventilation shaft running beneath its surface. The 300 and 250 feet long pipe sections of diameter 34 feet, 10 inches were fabricated by the Orange, Texas plant of Consolidated Western Steel. It served as a connection between State Highway 146 and State Highway 225 on the south to State Highway 146 and Spur 201 to the north. By the 1970s the tunnel had exceeded its capacity of 25,000 vehicles a day and in 1986 the Texas Department of Highways and Public Transportation awarded a contract for its replacement with an eight-lane

cable-stayed bridge A cable-stayed bridge has one or more ''towers'' (or ''pylons''), from which cables support the bridge deck. A distinctive feature are the cables or stays, which run directly from the tower to the deck, normally forming a fan-like pattern o ...

. With the closure of the tunnel occurring in 1995, a clause in the original tunnel permit issued by the corps called for the Department of Transportation to remove the facility if it became unused or abandoned. By 1997 a proposal was made to dismantle the unused facility in long sections, float them down the channel and sink each section in of water at the Freeport Liberty Ship Reef in creating an

artificial reef An artificial reef is a human-created underwater structure, typically built to promote marine life in areas with a generally featureless bottom, to control erosion, block ship passage, block the use of trawling nets, or improve surfing. Many re ...

for marine wildlife in the

Gulf of Mexico The Gulf of Mexico ( es, Golfo de México) is an oceanic basin, ocean basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, largely surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of ...

. This plan was scrapped due to both high costs in addition to the process resulting in over 50 closures of the channel to complete. The tunnel was removed by 1998 and its former structure was salvaged as paving aggregate.

References

External links

Baytown Tunnel, SH 146, and the Fred Hartman Bridge on TexasFreeways.com
for historical photos of the tunnel {{Texas Tunnels in Texas Crossings of the Houston Ship Channel Transportation buildings and structures in Harris County, Texas Greater Houston Galveston Bay Area Tunnels completed in 1953 Road tunnels in the United States