Posted on October 31, 2016
By Rob Ward, JOC.com
The sagging hopes for dredging the port of Santos to 17 meters (55.8 feet) have been given a lift by a new wave simulator at the University of Sao Paulo that will help to answer the question of how deep the harbor can be without hurting the port and surrounding community.
The simulator should help settle an ongoing debate in Latin America’s largest port about whether more regular flooding and destruction in the Ponta de Praia neighborhood is caused by waves made more powerful by stronger currents created by dredging or the sea level rise from global warming. Deeper berths of 17 meters would allow ships with capacities of 16,000 twenty-foot-equivalent units to call at the port compared with the current maximum of 10,000 TEUs because of the port’s depth of 15 meters.
“This realistic model will help us understand the movement of the oceans in and around Santos, and hopefully at the end of it we will have deeper berths and channels,” said Frederico Aguer Abdalla, deputy secretary, port affairs, Santos city hall.
Santos stakeholders have nearly given up on the idea of going to 17 meters because of difficulty in maintaining the current 15-meter depth. A reform by the central government to privatize dredging that is yet to take effect may make it easier to get that essential work done.
The wave simulator, a joint effort by the Santos port authority Codesp and the University of Sao Paulo’s hydraulics department, uses 2D and 3D wave simulations as well as a general model of the Santos estuary. The scale of the model is 1:120, which means every one meter in the simulator represents 120 meters in the real world.
Dredging could change currents at the port of Santos, but a breakwater might be able to protect the port and community, said Luiz Araujo, the managing director of Ecoporto Santos container terminal.
“We do need much more draft to accommodate the larger vessels, but things like this are very complicated for a port like Santos,” he said. “Hopefully, this detailed modeling and study will prove that we can go deeper without eroding our local beaches.”
While the simulator may have given a boost to those hoping for a depth of 17 meters in Santos, some are skeptical such a depth is possible.
“I am not sure Santos can go down further than 16 meters, otherwise it will change all the currents and that could cause serious erosion and for the existing quays to become unstable,” a veteran port consultant told JOC.com. “Also, there are rumors that some parts of the channel have rock formations that would be expensive to remove.”
Source: JOC
