An international panel is looking at ways to reduce dangerous wave surges in Geraldton Port, which reduce annual productivity by 10 to 15 per cent.
An international panel is looking at ways to reduce dangerous wave surges in Geraldton Port, which reduce annual productivity by 10 to 15 per cent.
Geraldton Port Authority estimates productivity lost from ‘wave surge’ costs $6 million each year.
The authority has asked wave and harbour design experts to present ideas on how to best manage the unusual harbour surge problem, which affects exports of iron ore, grain, livestock, fertiliser and minerals.
Iron ore, one of the port's main exports, was significantly restricted last year when berth five was closed for a total of 25 days due to wave surge.
Experts from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Spain have gathered in a three-day symposium to present ideas.
Geraldton Port Authority chief executive Peter Klein said the port had previously trialled plans to combat wave surge and increase safety, and now relied on predicting dangerous weather to determine when to close berths.
“Our problem is, as we understand it, unique in Australia,” Mr Klein said.
“Other than Port Taranaki (in New Zealand), in the Asia Pacific region at least we’re not aware of other ports with similar problems.
“We’ve established a model that now allows us to forecast in advance incidences where we think the port’s going to become energised and at that point we now progressively manage that so that vessels are either not brought in or in extreme cases will be sent out."
Each of the port’s seven berths has different threshold levels of how much wave surge they can safely withstand, with multi-user berth two most severely affected.
“We lost about 150 days last year at berth two. It’s not really affecting anyone because it’s a berth that’s not particularly widely used, it’s only used opportunistically. We’d love to use it more, but we just can’t,” Mr Klein said.
He said the port had previously trialled using its own shore mooring lines to better secure ships during wave surges, but concluded it was not an adequate solution.
“What occurs is the vessels alongside become energised and they start breaking mooring lines and when a mooring line breaks you really prefer to be well clear. It was seen as a significant safety risk for us,” Mr Klein said.
“We tried that system, it means we had to tension them from the shore, rather than using winches on the vessel. It was quite complex and quite heavy on manpower.
“That system didn’t deliver what we were looking for and that was abandoned. We didn’t think it was adding to the safety or in fact adding to the availability of the berth.”
Through ongoing safety measures the authority has managed to reduce mooring lines breakage from a record 240 lines breaking in 2007 to 86 lines breaking last year.
Mr Klein said the symposium would present ideas that could help mitigate or solve the problem using infrastructure, operations or new mooring technologies, including vacuum mooring.
However, he cautioned the solution had to be economic and appeal to the port’s customers, which would be asked to help finance any new project.
“This feels like a money pit to us, we feel like we could invest hours and millions in trying to engineer a solution,” he said.
“There’s got to be a return on whatever option or whatever options we ultimately settle upon, if any, because at this stage there’s still some doubt the group will agree there is a viable strategy above what we’re already doing,” Mr Klein said.
He said keeping within the parameters of cost effectiveness meant the solution might involve merely optimising and fine tuning the authority’s current approach.
“What we are doing might be the best that we can do, we want to assess whether that is the case,” he said.
