Jakarta dredging works get underway
Dutch dredging giants Royal Boskalis Westminster and Van Oord have won a contract valued at €350m from developer PT Muara Wisesa Samudra to design and construct a 160 hectare artificial island to become a self-contained city off the coast of Jakarta, Indonesia.
Each partner company in the joint venture is deploying one of its largest trailing suction hopper dredgers for a project that will require the winning and delivery of some 20 million m3 of dredged sand. Soil improvement and rock revetments also form part of a project which is now underway and due for completion in 2018.
Pluit City, as the island will be known, is driven by the need to create land to accommodate population growth in an already densely populated area. Jakarta, capital city of Indonesia, already has some 10 million inhabitants, placing strain on an infrastructure so weak that Jakarta has been ranked bottom of 50 large international cities in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index 2015. Land reclamation is a major strategy to accommodate future population growth and local authorities see expansion into the sea as a means of dealing with flood prevention and urban development.
Jakarta is sinking at between 7.5 and 14cm per year due to deep groundwater extraction and the pressure from high-rise buildings. It may be necessary to migrate more than four million people in the north of the city if no immediate action is taken against predicted sea level rise.
It is for these reasons that Indonesia and the Netherlands have joined together to construct the proposed $40bn National Capital Integrated Coastal Development (NCICD), otherwise known as the Giant Sea Wall Jakarta. The NCICD masterplan is a joint project between the governments of Indonesia and the Netherlands, with the feasibility study largely funded by the Dutch government.
Boskalis and Van Oord are not the only Dutch companies active in Jakarta. The NCICD project is led by a consortium headed by Witteveen+Bos as the main contractor and Grontmij, with KuiperCompagnons, Deltares, Ecorys and Triple-A as sub-consultants.
The Giant Sea Wall will be constructed just north of Jakarta’s bay as a measure to protect the city against flooding from the sea. Inside the wall, large lagoons will be created to buffer the outflow from 13 rivers in the city. The project is expected to take up to 15 years to complete, with existing dikes to be strengthened in the meantime.
In order to make the masterplan more attractive for private investors, the surface of the Giant Sea Wall will become a centre for urban development. This new integrated urban city will involve the construction of 17 artificial islands and will include a seaport. It is expected to absorb some two million people. Jakarta Propertindo has been appointed to coordinate the reclamation of the 17 artificial islands.
By Larz Bourne
