18 – Where I work

You already know that the port site is at least 15 km (10 miles) from the apartments.  That's a 15-minute commute, and there's never any traffic.  OK, maybe two trucks.  It's a boring drive, however.  Sand is just not that interesting after you've done it three or four times.  Here are some of the highlights of the drive.

Sand.  Vehicles on the horizon about 1/2 mile away.

More sand, and -- OMG! -- a bush!  Our KAEC apartments are on the left horizon about 5 miles away.

There are workers out here, amidst the sand, installing irrigation for palm trees and some sort of ground cover in the median.

The picture below is the best I could find about how the port is getting built.  I haven't really taken any pictures of construction because there has been a confidentiality requirement for the past year.  This morning (Saturday) I was told it's OK to post photos of the job site, so I'll be burning up electrons making my digital photos.



KAP, looking south.  The Red Sea is to the right, sand is to the left.

The color balance is off in the photo above, but it shows a couple of important items.  There are two dredges working the top center and left edge of the basin.  These big ships have gigantic drill bits in their bows that stir through the soil and get it all agitated in the water.  They also have giant suction pipes that continuously suck water and suspended silt out of the basin, and send it (slurry) flowing down the pipelines attached to their sterns.

Blue clamshell

Both dredges in this photo have their slurry pipes converging at the shoreline, where a pipe runs diagonally towards the bottom of the photo.  The slurry is carried to the end of the pipe, where it's dumped on the ground.  The water evaporates (probably in ten minutes here) and the sludge begins to build a small mountain.  The exit end of the slurry pipe is moved every few days, and the KAP dredges have managed to build quite a mountain range over the past year.  (Not tall enough to ski, but we're not through dredging.)

You can see the nice circular slices made by the dredges.  They're pinned in place by hydraulic jacks on their sterns, and pivot slowly back and forth until they've dredged to the 18m (60 feet) depth required for this project.

The other vessel (upper right) is a barge-mounted clamshell.  It's been used to remove soil above the waterline so the dredges can start digging below the waterline.  The past few days, it's been working on the bottom right corner of the photo, smoothing out the edges of the quay.


STS crane.  Note people walking.

There are two types of cranes used in a port.

Ship-to-Shore cranes lift containers off the ship and place them on a 'terminal truck' to be hauled to the temporary spot it will inhabit on the yard.

Our STS cranes were purchased from Liebherr in Germany and shipped in a state of "some assembly required". 

We have three of them, and each can lift a 65-ton container.  I have no idea how tall they are, except "real".  As in "real tall".  They're custom painted with "King Abdullah Port", too.  Sweet.

The lower photo provides some scale, and shows the two other cranes that are helping assemble this one: STS-04.

Like I said, we have three of these, and the rumor is they're the biggest in the world, but Liebherr is building two bigger ones that should be commissioned in December.

Oh yeah, that grey box at the top?  That's the operator's cabin.  It's big enough for three people and has a bathroom.  As you can see it's larger than the Chevy Suburban at the bottom of the crane.

STS Crane from far away.



The other type of crane is the Rubber-Tired Gantry, or RTG.  We have 22 of them on site, with 2 assembled and the others lying in neat rows of pieces.



RTGs move around the multi-acre container yard, picking containers off the terminal trucks and placing them in the correct space, on the correct row, on the correct aisle, on the correct level above the pavement.  For contrast, the STS rolls on railroad rails at the edge of the wharf and never leaves the quayside.

Our RTGs are capable of "one over six" which means our container stacks will be six tall, and the RTGs can place a container on the seventh level for a temporary move to fetch one from underneath.

So, you can see that the real effort in port management is to have an idea of which containers will sit for a while, and which are destined for pickup tomorrow.  The stacking scheme should attempt to eliminate (or at least minimize) shuffling and re-stacking.

One of my high points was touching the Red Sea.  Geeky, yes, but I've touched a lot of the world's bodies of water.  I was wandering around with one of the Beirut techno-guys.  We know each other from his visits to Boston.  He had no idea I knew anything about seaports so we wandered around looking at things with him asking questions.  I was headed toward the water, and he decided to join me.

Our cute little 4-story-tall RTGs standing behind their BIG brother.

We got to the revetments; the shoreline protection against storms and wave action.  I told him I was headed across the rocks to touch the Red Sea, and he said, "OK, I'll watch."

The rocks close to the water are the size of La-Z-Boy recliners or coffee tables, and presented little hindrance to me scrambling across them and down eight feet.  As I squatted to reach my hand into the water, I looked up and there was my buddy, only a few feet away, reaching for the sea.  "When I saw you doing it, I wanted to touch the water myself."

Cool to share a moment like that.

Revetments stacked on rocks between Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea.

These revetments are a variation on the venerable tetrapod.  They look a little like jacks -- you know, the childhood game of bounce the ball, grab some jacks?  These are H-shaped in one plane, with a toothpick stabbed perpendicularly though the H's cross member.  The shape allows them to interlock and provide exceptional protection against wave forces.

Over a few years, the rocks and revetments will sprout seaweed, which will attract little fish, crabs, and other small sea creatures.  A few years later, the bigger fish will start hanging out, and pretty soon you have a nice marine community going.  Makes for good fishing, too.

Next: More pictures of the port.  Or maybe pictures of the office.  Or maybe more pictures of sand.