Current Projects

The Project

In December 2004, the major expansion of the port at the mouth of the Brisbane River was completed - the first step in providing an additional 230 hectares of land for the rapid commercial growth of the port.

The port expansion project involved constructing a perimeter seawall and filling the enclosed area over approximately 15 years using material from maintenance dredging.

The Impact Assessment Study for the project was completed in late 2000, along with a stringent set of environmental controls to minimise impacts to the surrounding environment.

The FPE Seawall Alliance

The Corporation formed an Alliance with Leighton Contractors, Coffey Geosciences, WBM Oceanics and Parsons Brinckerhoff to design and construct the seawall.

This group was collectively known as the FPE Seawall Alliance.

The FPE Seawall Alliance team provided expertise in design, construction, environmental management and community relations for the project.

The Seawall

The seawall is a rock structure, which is placed on top of a layer of geotextile (Adobe pdf 0.1MB) and sand. It is 4.6km long, and made up of about 1.25 million tonnes of rock (Adobe pdf 0.09MB), 220,000m² of high-strength geotextile, 155,000m² of filtration geotextile, and 425,000m³ of sand.

The geotextile was laid onto the seabed using a customised barge (Adobe pdf 0.09MB).

The seawall extends along the current port berth line into Moreton Bay to the northeast for approximately 1.8km, before sweeping in a flat-sided horseshoe shape to the south and joining back to the port some 1,400m south of the start point.

The seawall was constructed in water depths ranging from less than 1m up to 6m.

The construction of the seawall commenced in mid August 2003 and was completed by August 2005.

Monitoring

The seawall lies immediately adjacent to the Moreton Bay Marine Park to the east and south. The Alliance therefore placed a high emphasis on the management of the sensitive environmental aspects of the area. Careful attention was given to turbidity control (Adobe pdf 0.11MB) measures and other impact mitigation measures to minimise impacts on the marine park during construction activities.

In particular, the Alliance provided specialised environmental and ecology representatives to constantly monitor and manage impacts on seagrass (Adobe pdf 0.16MB) and shorebirds (Adobe pdf 0.12MB) in these areas.

The project also employed geotechnical instrumentation placed regularly along the length of the seawall to monitor the geotechnical performance of the wall during placement and into the future.

Reclamation

Reclamation of the FPE commenced in January 2005, and the first 15-hectare area should be ready for the next stage of reclamation (surcharging with sand) in February 2006.