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Maputo Port will be able to receive ships of up to 85,000 tonnes in February 2017, when the current dredging of the 76 kilometre long port entrance channel is scheduled to be complete.
The director of projects for the Maputo Port Development Company (MPDC), Paulo Mata, told reporters on Friday “Right now the channel is 11 metres, after the dredging that was carried out in 2010. But, in order to achieve our strategic goal of handling 40 million tonnes of cargo a year by 2020, we are banking on the dredging we are doing now that will increase the depth to 14 metres along the length of the access channel”.
With the current limitations imposed by the depth of the channel, the port’s capacity is only 25 million tonnes of cargo a year.
The dredges for this job have been mobilized by the international dredging company Jan de Nul Dredging Middle East FZE. The first suction dredge arrived in the port in mid-May, and has been working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
A second suction dredge arrives in late June, and now the largest cutter dredge in the world, the “J.F.J. de Nul”, has arrived. It will start working with the other two dredges on Sunday. The entire dredging operation is estimated to cost 100 million US dollars.
Speaking on board the “J.F.J. de Nul”, Mata said that, unlike the suction dredges, which are removing sediment, this section is cutting into the rock at the bottom of some sections of the channel. It is accompanied by two barges which will receive the dredged material and deposit it at sites indicated by the Ministry of Land, Environment and Rural Development.
Mick Formesyn, the Jan de Nul project director, told the journalists that its three giant motors and its 1,400 tonne rotating cutter head, makes this the most powerful dredge in the world.
“We shall dredge the parts of the channel where there is rocky material at the bottom”, he said. “We expect more or less two months of work, and in that time we shall remove a million cubic metres of material”.
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