Three multi-million-euro dredging projects have issued tenders in Italy, from the west to the south and back up to the east.
A fourth, at Parma, is worth just short of €1 million.
The most valuable tender of almost €19 million is for extensive works at the Port of Ancona halfway down the eastern coast of Italy’s ‘boot’. All seven commercial piers will be dredged to depths ranging from 12.5m-14m, with around 730,000m3 of sediment removed and deposited in an offshore disposal area.
Quoting the port authority, the World Ports Organization said the works were the largest investment it had ever made, and had been approved after a complicated authorisation process.
”The intervention is crucial to improving the port’s navigability and enhancing its competitiveness, enabling the docking of larger capacity and higher tonnage vessels,” it says. “The goal is to foster the development of port activities and the economic growth of the region by providing a more efficient infrastructure aligned with the demands of international trade.”
Preliminary works will include ordnance clearance of the entire basin and continuous environmental monitoring.
Next in value is a tender for works at the Port of La Spezia in Italy’s north west. The €14 million tender is an open procedure for ’reclamation works of the bottom of the merchant port… ‘starting an extraordinary maintenance phase of the seabed in front of the first port basin in infrastructure and construction’ – in other words, expanding the quay area by using material dredged from the seabed.
The expanded quay area will include semi-automatic electric vehicles and more storage areas for a port which intends to increase traffic up to 2 million TEU.
The third largest tender has been issued at the Port of Molfetta in the southwest of Italy, namely a €10.5 million integrated seabed dredging project to widen and deepen the waterfront.
Finally at the Port of Parma, dredging services are required in the stretch of the Po River Cremona. All tenders and many others can be seen on our sister site, Home | Maritime Contracts Journal.
