A relatively new technique for dredging is slowly growing in popularity: Water Injection Dredging (WID).
Water Injection Dredging is not the answer to every dredging project – but it is gaining favour as an up-and-coming low-cost, low-impact method. And as demand for Water Injection Dredging has increased, so has the fleet of purpose-built Water Injection Dredgers.
Why this mounting attention? Water Injection Dredging has clear advantages in specific situations.
For instance, WID is eminently suited to maintenance dredging where the quantities of sediment are variable and can range from thin to thicker layers, where the sediments to be dredged are the most recent layers which have formed in navigation channels and harbours, and where the environment is dynamic so that sedimentation and erosion are on-going occurrences even as dredging is taking place.
Water Injection Dredgers have other advantages as well. They are environmentally low impact and less expensive than some other traditional means: They are relatively small in size and their small size makes them extremely manoeuvrable in tight spaces and heavily trafficked shipping lanes; they do not require auxiliary equipment and they need fewer crew members. All of this leads to cost savings.
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Press Release, March 13, 2013