Extensions are planned for berths 6, 7, 8 and 9 at the port of Maputo in Mozambique, located in the Mozambique Channel in the Indian Ocean. It is Africa’s nearest port to rapidly developing markets of Asia and is the closest deep-water port to Johannesburg, Mpumalanga and Limpopo. 

 

The Maputo Port has benefited from substantial dredging over the past few years, including work on the access channel by Jan de Nul Dredging Middle East in 2016 which was completed at the cost of US$85 million. The overall minimum depth of the channel was increased to 14.3 meters from 11 meters to allow access for post-Panamax vessels enabling larger volumes of cargo. 

 

The next phase of port improvements already underway will provide access for even large vessels to encourage the world’s shipping lines to include Maputo on their intercontinental route

Rather than just the feeder routes they are on at this time. The work to increase the depths of the berths to 15 meters is scheduled for completion in January 2020. 

There are a total of 700 piles to be installed for this project. To verify load calculations and optimize the size of the piles, the designer and contractor required that three piles be tested. They fully endorsed the Osterberg test method as the most convenient method for these tests. After evaluating and comparing testing services provided by several companies around the world they chose the Ougan Group to complete the tests using the Super Cell load test. 

 

Two of Ougan’s engineers spent almost a month on this project completing all three load tests. After careful analysis of the test data from our data analyst engineer the completed report was sent to the designer, giving him adequate information of the pile load capacity on this project.