First phase of Maasvlakte 2 completed

The expansion at the Port of Rotterdam was started by the contractor five years ago and phase 1 includes 700 hectares of new industrial site, 11km of seawall, 3.5km of quay wall, 14km of rail and 560 hectares of port basin.

The €1.1bn construction agreement awarded to PUMA also included design and a maintenance contract for ten years.

Phase 1 saw 240 million cubic metres of sand being sprayed to create land, raise industrial sites and construct 7.5 kilometres of beach and dunes. Seven million tonnes of riprap, 20,000 concrete blocks, each weighing more than 40 tonnes and 150,000 tonnes of clay were processed in the 3.5 kilometres of hard seawall. Around 300,000 cubic metres of concrete was used in the construction of the quay walls.

More than 2,000 people worked around 6 million hours without any accidents involving permanent injury.

Boskalis and Van Oord used dozens of trailing suction dredgers, cutter suction dredgers, stone dumpers, backhoes, bulldozers, dumpers and various other kinds of equipment over the past five years. At the height of the sand work in the spring of 2010, there could be up to 12 trailing suction dredgers working at the same time. At one point, 3.8 million cubic metres of sand was extracted and processed in the reclaimed land in one single week. This was a world record for the amount of sand extracted at sea which had ever been transported to a single project by trailing suction dredgers.

The port authority is now working on accessibility and the installation of leading lights and buoys in time for Maasvlakte 2’s opening on 22 May 2013.

Work in the coming year will be focused on the construction of a new flyover, which will seemlessly connect the new port terminal to the existing one.

APM Terminals and DP World are set to open the container terminals for business in late 2014.