Renovation of quay walls

A quay wall almost never fails where you can see it. Chloride attack, wash-out behind the panels, corroding sheet piling and loss of material at the toe all develop in the two or three metres below water level that nobody inspects between maintenance cycles. Renovation therefore starts as a measurement exercise: we establish what the wall looks like today, in numbers, before anyone talks about repair budgets.

The survey is graded per section: visual and tactile inspection, ultrasonic wall-thickness readings on steel, crack and spalling mapping on concrete, probing for voids behind the wall and a bed-level check at the toe. Everything is tied to chainage, so a section that measured 9,2 mm this year can be compared with the same section three years from now. That history is what turns a repair into a planned investment instead of an emergency.

Repairs are executed to the agreed specification and phased around terminal operations: high-pressure cleaning, reinforcement treatment, underwater formwork and grout or underwater concrete, anode replacement, and injection of the fill behind the wall where wash-out has created voids. We work section by section with agreed movement windows, so in most cases only part of the berth is out of service at any time and the client keeps trading.