Twice as big as JFK International and nearly three times larger than Sydney Airport, the New Manila International Airport (NMIA) will rise on 2,500 hectares of land and, once completed, it will be ready for 100 million passengers annually.
The problem is that, within 30 years, Nosy Tarsee gathered from infrastructure think tank B1M, the NMIA could flood and sink, rendering the $15-billion project defunct.
For the NMIA, the Dutch dredging company Boskalis employed a selection of vessels known as dredgers to act like hoovers and suck up sand from one location and transport it to another.
Once the sand was deposited in Manila Bay, Boskalis began preparing the land.
However, the problem with dumping sand and sediment into the sea is soil liquefaction. The material is saturated with water, which makes the base unstable — not ideal for something as heavy as an airport.
Boskalis’s solution is called dynamic compaction, a process by which 10 to 20-ton hammers are dropped repeatedly from 10 to 25 meters high.
That compresses the soil, displacing any water within and making it a sturdier surface to build on, a bit like squeezing a sponge.
Earlier this year, it was reported that 80 percent of the land had been prepared, but that’s behind schedule, and the blame lies in the lack of material.
The sand used to build these foundations comes from elsewhere, and Boskalis ran out.
“The stuff we built our sand castles with as kids is actually an incredibly hot commodity — behind water, it’s the most consumed natural resource on the planet,” according to B1M.
Nearly seven billion tons of sand and sediment are dredged from the seas around the world each year, but as massive as those reserves are, they’re limited.
Sand is used for everything from concrete and mortar to your more obvious applications like golf course bunkers and playground sand pits.
Worldwide demand has turned into a vicious war, with people killed in the struggle for this material.
Riverbeds and beaches are being stripped as developers search for more and more and once Boskalis ran out of sand from the original site, the project had no choice but to halt, delaying the opening date by a year.