French President Kicks Off Calais Port Extension Project

The foundation stone laying ceremony for the Calais Port 2015 extension project took place on Monday, 26 September, in the presence of the French President, François Hollande.

The design-build contract for the Port of Calais scheme was awarded in March 2016 to a consortium formed around Bouygues Travaux Publics (the lead company), Colas Nord-Picardie, Spie Batignolles and Jan De Nul.

Xavier Bertrand, President of the Hauts-de-France Regional Council, Natacha Bouchart, Mayor of Calais, Jean-Marc Puissesseau, Chairman and Chief Executive of Société d’Exploitation des Ports du Détroit, Patrick Vandevoorde, Chairman of Société des Ports du Détroit and Philippe Bonnave, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Bouygues Construction also attended the ceremony.

To mark this occasion of the construction site official launch, the main partners of the project signed a document which was sealed inside a concrete X-bloc, the emblem of the working site.

The Calais breakwater will be protected by Xbloc concrete armor units with a weight between 10 and 33 tons. The blocks are produced by Bouygues Construction in an industrial automated process.

This capital development project also includes:

• the creation of a new 3 kilometer seawall along with a new 100 hectare harbor basin to the north of the current facilities;
• the construction of three new ferry berths and a roll-on/roll-off berth inside the harbor basin;
• 4 million cubic meters of marine dredging to constitute the new quays;
• the development of new cross-Channel traffic reception capacities including 44 hectares of parking facilities and roads as well as roughly twenty operational and reception buildings.

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