Container traffic through the Port of Antwerp in Belgium has reached capacity levels. It grew 14% in 2003, hitting 5.5m tonne equivalent units (TEU). The new Deurganck dock, now under construction, is expected to double the port’s handling capacity. At a cost of €430m, it is said to be Europe’s largest current construction project.
Work began on site preparation in October 1999 but was suspended in May 2001 because of controversy over the project’s environmental impact assessment and the procedures that had been followed to secure planning permission. It took nearly a year to resolve these matters and, with delays in re-mobilisation and and the disruption of summer holidays, it was not until September 2002 that work really got going again. While full completion is scheduled for 2006/07, the first ships will be visiting the dock by September 2005. So urgent is the need for terminal capacity in Antwerp, quay sections are being opened before the whole project is finished.
Deurganck dock comprises two quays, each 2.6km long and 450m wide. The concession for operating the east quay has been awarded to a consortium led by P&O. The concession for operating the west quay has been awarded to Hesse-Noord Natie (HNN), the Belgian subsidiary of Singapore’s PSA International.
The new terminal is a tidal dock, outside of the existing locks, providing direct access to the river.
The construction of the Deurganck dock is being carried out in three phases. The first phase is starting the west quay, along a length of 1.25km on an area of 80ha. The second phase is construction of a 1.35km length of the east quay length and a further 400m on the west quay. The third phase involves construction of 53ha of terminals on the west side and 62ha on the east side of the tidal dock, completing the full 2.6km length of each.
The quay walls of the Deurganck dock are semi-gravity walls of reinforced concrete, built in an L-shape, with a total height of 30m. The actual quay wall has a height of 23.5m. The foundation slab has a width of 24m, varying in thickness from 2.7m to 5.5m. The quay wall has a thickness of 5m at the top and 4.2m at the foot. The walls are built in a deep excavation, kept dry by a closed-circuit pumping system in which water is pumped out of the excavation and returned to the ground outside the construction site (to prevent subsidence).
Main contractor for phase one is the Cordeel-Aertssen consortium; phase two is in the hands of the consortium MBG-CFE-Van Laere-Dredging International. For phase three, both parties will come together to form the TV Deurganckdok consortium.
It is inevitable that most of this project is about excavation – 8.5m cubic metres is being dug out – but there is a vast amount of civil engineering works too. Groundwater level has had to be lowered by 26m, which involved more than 1km of 50m deep sheet piling. The embankment walls and the foundations require more than 300,000m³ of steel-reinforced concrete. The steel used to construct the walls would be enough to build seven and a half Eiffel towers, the project office has calculated.
Sea dredged material for the concrete amounts to 1.2m tonnes. Once the walls are completed, the sea dam will be opened and more than 15m cubic metres of material will be suction dredged to provide a minimum of 16m water depth. The dredger is already in position.
Equipment used on the project includes about 10 Caterpillar excavators loading a fleet of 40t Caterpillar and Volvo articulated dump trucks, shifting the footings for the wall as it progresses.
A fleet of crawler cranes is being used for a variety of duties in construction of the concrete quay walls. Hitachi, Kobelco and American Crane brands are much in evidence. Work is progressing rapidly, with up to 7,000m3 of concrete poured per week supplied from a Stetter concrete batching plant on site. Concrete trucks run constantly at a rate of one every two minutes.
The various cranes are used primarily for positioning reinforcing steel and flying the various formwork and climbing scaffolding systems in to place. Large parts of the formwork can be positioned in a single 20t lift – while this is not a vast weight, it has to be placed at reach across the 24m foundation excavation, after picking up reinforcing sections from close to the rear of the machines.
One of the newest cranes on site is a 135t-capacity Kobelco CKE 1350 crawler with 42.7m of main boom. It was purchased earlier this year by Benelmat, the equipment subsidiary of CFE (part of the east quay contracting consortium). Marc Crommen, CFE’s plant, safety and quality manager for TV Deurganckdok, says: ‘First impressions of the Kobelco are very good. I am very impressed with its ability to erect itself, the ease and low cost of maintenance, performance characteristics, operation smoothness and the overall lifting table. It also offers versatility and is ideal for clamshell work.’
CFE and Benelmat’s choice of Kobelco was partly inspired by seeing Sarens-de Kil’s 150t-capacity Kobelco 7150 on the Deurganck dock jobsite for more than a year. They wanted a machine that could handle both general lifting and earthmoving work equally comfortably.
When fully operational, the Deurganck dock terminal will be equipped with more than 100 straddle carriers and 24 dockside ship-to-shore container cranes that are capable of handling vessels up to 20 containers wide. It will also have facilities to transfer containers for truck, rail and barge connections.
