Container Wharf with an Innovative Precast Deck in a High Seismicity Area

Located on the remote Aguadulce Peninsula in Buenaventura on the Pacific coast of Colombia, the Sociedad Puerto Industrial de Aguadulce (SPIA) container wharf is a T-headed pile-supported wharf comprising a 600-meter-long quay connected to a 160-meter-long access trestle and a 25-meter-long platform. The wharf is designed to support Super Post-Panamax ship-to-shore cranes and berth 12,500-TEU container vessels. The marine contractor chose to build the wharf with a top-down construction system to expedite construction. The benefits of this system were maximized by the implementation of a deck system composed primarily of precast concrete (PC) elements over high-capacity driven steel pipe piles. The deck system involved the use of an innovative PC plug providing the connection between the pipe piles and the PC deck elements. The PC plugs had to not only provide structural performance equivalent to the widely accepted cast-in-place concrete plugs, but also had to be optimized for transportation and erection. This paper describes how the different PC elements forming the wharf deck system were designed, detailed, erected, and connected. The paper also presents key results of the seismic analyses and design. The design of the deck was particularly challenging because of the need to implement seismic capacity protection principles in one of the world’s highest seismic areas. The paper also elaborates on how the top-down construction system was implemented. This system lends itself to a linear construction approach that uses previously-installed steel pipe piles as supporting elements of a platform that rapidly installs future piles and PC deck elements and then moves forward to continue with the rest of construction.