Arlington National Cemetery, a military cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, has commenced construction work on a 20,000-niche columbarium, which will extend the life of the cemetery’s inurnment space to 2024. The new columbarium, a structure that holds urns containing cremated remains, will be almost the length of two football fields. Construction work on columbarium will commence in January 2011, and is slated to be completed in June 2013.
The cemetery’s chief engineer, Victoria Bruzese, was reported that the new structure will dwarf the previous eight columbariums, and she added, the largest of which contains 8,000 niches and the smallest 3,000.
Bruzese said that the columbariums will be 540 feet long, 116 feet wide, and at its highest elevation about 11 feet tall. She added that the cemetery will have more than 20,000 niches, which gives us the ability to have three to four inurnments within each niche.