DEME Building Material Launches Gravel Hopper Dredge Victor Horta
DEME Building Material Launches Gravel Hopper Dredge Victor Horta
On December 15 DEME Building Materials (DBM) held a naming and launching ceremony for their new 5000 cubic meter (6540 cubic yard) gravel hopper dredge Victor Horta at the Verenigde Scheepswerf Heusden shipyard in Heusden The Netherlands where IHC Merwede is building the dredge.
The Victor Horta will join its sister ship Charlemagne in DBM’s fleet of aggregate dredges.
The ceremony was performed by Rachel Brett the wife of Bill Brett chairman of the Brett Group a major independent U.K.-based construction and building materials company.
The commissioning of the dredge will take place in 2011.
The contract for the design construction and delivery of the vessel was signed on May 16 2008 between DEME NV and IHC Dredgers BV and the keel was laid on March 19 2010. The vessel is named after Belgian architect and pioneer of the Art Nouveau style Victor Horta (1861-1947). He designed several notable buildings such as Hotel Tassel in Brussels the first significant expression of Art Nouveau in architecture at the end of the 19th century.
The dredge is equipped with a powerful submersible pump enabling it to dredge sand and gravel from a maximum depth of 60 meters. The vessel was designed with a relatively shallow draft of 8.5 meters fully loaded enabling it to enter Europe’s main ports with a 10000 tonne load. A state-of-the-art facility for dry discharge with a boom conveyor allows unloading at a rate of 2400 tonnes/hour.
The Victor Horta along with its sister ship Charlemagne sets new dimensions in marine gravel winning opening the way to deeper concessions in areas that have less impact on coastal erosion portfolio of long-term concessions spanning an area from northern Germany over the U.K. to the Seine estuary in France.
In the past decade DBM acquired long-term concessions and dredging rights in French U.K. Belgian German and Polish waters. The availability of these concessions along with the two high-capacity dredges will ensure reliability of product to the company’s clients.
DBM has opened a new gravel processing plant with an annual capacity of 1.5 million tons in Flushing The Netherlands. Long-standing partnerships have been created with French British and German construction industry partners.
The company is opening additional aggregate processing plants in Amsterdam as well as in Dunkirk France and Ostend Belgium in order to take a much bigger market share in the Benelux (an economic union that includes Belgium the Netherlands and Luxembourg). DBM will intensify its marketing efforts on the Benelux markets based on its new concessions and extra capacity. Additional crushing units will be installed in the processing plants to meet customer demand for constant availability of a wide range of grades.
DEME Building Materials is a subsidiary of the DEME Group (Dredging Environmental and Marine Engineering NV) which was founded in 2000 to dredge process and market sea aggregates in the European market.
