Safety and capacity wet infrastructure Puerto America, Venezuela

Lake Maracaibo is the largest brackish lake of South America. Presently Lake Maracaibo suffers from an increased salinity, eutrophication and pollution from oil exploitation. The dredged navigation channel used to access the various harbours on the lake causes increased salinity from the Gulf of Venezuela. To reduce salt intrusion the closure of the dredged channel is considered. As a result however, these harbours will become inaccessible for deep draughted vessels. For this reason a new port has been designed, called Puerto Am rica, at the entrance from the Gulf of Venezuela on the peninsula San Bernardo and the Island of Zapara. The purpose of Puerto Am rica is to tranship oil, petrochemicals, coal, containers, grain and general cargo. Especially with respect to nautical safety, influencing the capacity of the wet infra structure of this port, a manoeuvring simulation model and a traffic flow simulation model were developed. Based on safety criteria the output of the manoeuvring simulation model results in traffic rules and manoeuvring strategies, which in turn are used as input for the traffic flow simulation model to determine the capacity of the wet infrastructure. After a brief summary of the environmental conditions, commodity throughput and expected vessel types, the paper gives a description of the manoeuvring and the traffic flow simulation models. The combination of the two models proved to be highly valuable tool to optimise the harbour systems. Overall dimensions of dredging works, breakwaters and the number of berths were optimised using these models.