They are one of the main issues of the project. Each ferry berth in Calais Port 2015 will make several thousand calls per year and for many decades.
In this context, a very special care has been brought to their design, in particular to the P11 / P12 berth as a whole to be the first “finger pier” dock in the port of Calais. This design is common in the port of Dover, based on a large and long boom running into the basin perpendicular to the pre-boarding platforms.
Perfectly adapted to a ro-ro port, a finger pier allows
ship docking on either side of the infrastructure.
Initially planned in the form of a hundred-metre pile dock extended by two “soft” berthing fronts made up of dolphins, the work design has been significantly revised to take into account wishes of the shipping companies and the concessionaire. The Design and Construction Joint Venture engineers designed the finger pier as a nearly 300 m long and 26 m wide full dock, made up of sand-filled sheet pile boxes on top of which a large concrete crown beam is anchored to cover the upper part of the platforms on the whole length. A heavy pavement structure will allow maintenance or emergency equipment to be used at any point on the ferries.
This structure design will allow a greater scalability with new quayside networks (bunkering, energy, …) or new linkspan structures to be easily added.
The first construction works for this future double quay are scheduled for October 2018.