What we do

Challenge

To guarantee the safe passage of shipping traffic to the terminals along the river Unter- and Außenweser and especially to the harbour of Bremerhaven, it is essential to maintain the fairway and turning basins of Brake, Nordenham and Bremerhaven to their required depth and width.

The contract for maintaining the fairway of the River Weser in the years 2017 and 2018 was awarded to Nordsee Nassbagger- und Tiefbau in a joint venture with Van Oord Deutschland (recently renamed to Van Oord Wasserbau).

Solution

In order to maintain the fairway to the required depth in order to guarantee the safe passage of the shipping, we were required to perform maintenance dredging along the River Weser totalling 14.7 million m³ sand and silt.

The River Weser is divided into 10 dredging sections and several dumping zones were allocated through dredge orders and are located outside of the navigational channel. The width of the navigational channel we had to maintain extends from 200 m at km 40, to 300 m at km 130. The average sailing distance between the dredging and dumping zones was 15 km. The dredging depth varied between 9.50 m and 16.00 m SKN, with a maximum allowed dredging tolerance of -0.50 m.

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