First Piles Driven for Burchardkai Expansion

The project will increase BCT handling from 2.6m TEU now, to a hoped for 5.2m TEU.

Hamburg officials are quick to point out that the increase will be nearly as much as the total handling capacity of Germany’s new JadeWeser Port in Wilhelmshaven after that terminal is finished in 2010. Hamburg opted out of the project in 2003.

Klaus-Dieter Peters, chief of the HHLAowned Burchardkai, calls the expansion project ‘open-heart surgery’ because the terminal continues to operate normally around it.

A new rail station on Burchardkai went into operation last September and older stowage halls have already been demolished at the 40 year old terminal. HHLA is also building and testing automatically operated block storage facilities behind the quaysides.

Work is now well under way on Berth 2 after the first piles were driven. The berth, capable of handling the biggest container ships and with a 500m long quayside, will be finished in November next year. It is in fact a reinforced quayside alongside an existing quayside and will bear the weight of bigger, higher capacity container cranes.

Berth 2 is the first of three new berths, all on 16.7m of Elbe water, being built side by side along 1,100m of quayside in three construction stages up to 2012. The work has been planned, commissioned and carried out by the recentlycreated Hamburg Port Authority. HHLA will lease the new facility.

The Burchardkai project is just part of planned expansion at three HHLA terminals costing about ¢1.2bn, itself part of Hamburg infrastructure expansion up to about 2015 costing an estimated ¢2.5bn.

By Tom Todd