Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V. has been awarded a contract by the Vallei en Veluwe district water board for the construction of the Veessen-Wapenveld high-water channel in the province of Gelderland, the Netherlands.
The project is one of the more than 30 measures that make up the Dutch national Room for the River program, which is aimed at providing better flood protection for areas close to the country’s rivers. The work, which will be executed in conjunction with Van Hattum en Blankevoort in the IJsselweide construction consortium, is scheduled to start after the summer. The contract represents a value of around EUR 75 million of which Boskalis’ share is 50%.
Room for the River
The high-water channel will be between 500 and 1,500 meters wide and will be formed by building two dikes of around 8 kilometers long between the villages of Veessen and Wapenveld.
In addition to this new contract Boskalis is already involved in several other major hydraulic engineering projects in the context of the government’s Room for the River program. These include the Lower Rhine project, which involves adapting four flood plains along the river between the towns of Renkum and Rhenen, the Deventer project, where a total of six secondary channels of the IJssel river are being dug along a length of 10 kilometers, and the Noordwaard project near the town of Gorinchem, where an area is being ‘depoldered’ to allow the New Merwede river to flow more rapidly during periods of excess rainfall.
Boskalis’ strategy is aimed at benefitting from key macro-economic factors which drive worldwide demand in the markets: expansion of the global economy, increase in energy consumption, global population growth and the challenges that go hand in hand with climate change. This project is largely driven by climate change.
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Press Release, July 3, 2013