Al-Faw Grand Port
Staging Pier/Eastern Breakwater for Al-Faw Grand Port
Both Iraq and the broader northern Gulf region need a fully-equipped deep water sea port with sufficient capacity to handle rapidly growing volumes of international trade. The Iraqi government identified the existing port of the Al-Faw Peninsula, where the Shatt Al-Arab meets the Gulf, to be developed to meet this need.
The depth of the quays (-17.5 m) will allow the operation of the new generation of container ships. The special quays will be 7,000m long (about 20 berths). The specialist quays for moving dry bulk will be 3,500m long (about 12 berths).
A dredged channel 400m wide and 24km long will connect the new port to the deep water; dredged volumes will be approximately 60.000.000m3 for the navigation channel and 82.000.000m3 for the port basins, protected by rubble mound breakwaters approximately 15km long.
As part of the port development a rubble mound breakwater approximately 15km long was constructed.
Project Summary
- Name
- Al-Faw Grand Port
- Location
- Iraq
- Date
- 2013
- Client
- General Company for Iraqi Ports
- Contractor
- Archirodon
- Instrumentation Specialist
- Geosense
- Consultant
- Technital
Monitoring
Monitoring was being carried out on dedicated cross sections in order to measure the degree of consolidation of the foundation soil and the stability of the breakwater embankment during construction.
At each location multiple push-in type vibrating wire piezometers were installed into the seabed to various depths up to a maximum depth of 19m to monitor pore water pressure in the foundation soil. Other monitoring includes topographic and morphological survey.
As the initial installation of the piezometers were over approximately 4-6m of water, installation of the piezometers was done from floating barges and the piezometers connected to a data logger situated on floating buoys at designated locations. The buoys were located at approximately 1km centres and therefore data retrieval is the challenge.
Geosense proposed the Wi-SOS 400 wireless system which transmits data via radio to distances up to 8km. The Wi-SOS 800 nodes are located on floating buoys and the data loggers are powered using solar panels. Data is transferred from the node to the gateway using VHF radio with distances up to 8km.
