Best Project, Airport/Port: Colombo Port City Development Project Phase 1

Owner: CHEC Port City Colombo Pvt. Ltd.
Lead Design Firm: CCCC-FHDI Engineering Co. Ltd.
General Contractor: China Harbour Engineering Co. Ltd.

Monsoons and the often turbulent Indian Ocean did not stop construction of the first phase of Sri Lanka’s new Colombo Port City, a crucial future economic hub for the country. Crews completed work on a 269-hectare artificial island and related structures within 36 months, despite losing 18 months to impacts of monsoon season.

Port City, located between Dubai and Singapore, is intended to be South Asia’s premiere residential, retail and business destination, with more than 5 million sq m of built space within a meticulously planned urban area along the ocean’s warm waters. But the location also posed challenges related to wave motions.

The overall layout of the project under complex design wave conditions—such as swell and storm waves from varying directions—was determined based on wave and water exchange studies and 3D physical model testing.

Extensive 3D modeling and visualization methods helped analyze both wave and complex weather conditions to optimize design of artificial lagoons, beaches, canals, breakwaters and sand barriers.

Crews built the 5,325-m-long breakwater that has a geometrically closed core partially consisting of sand material, rock and interlocking concrete “pods” weighing from 17 tonnes to 22 tonnes and placed in predefined lozenge-shaped grids, says Deng Tao, design manager at CCCC-FHDI Engineering Co., Ltd., the lead project designer.

The artificial island consists of 71 million sq m of sand, with an average reclamation thickness of 20 m. Twelve types of rock material were used, obtained from 20 quarries located about 50 km away, says Tao.

Within the 36-month construction period, the available time to build the land area formation was only 23 months due to monsoon season, with protective structures needed to be completed in only 18 months.

Back to ENR Global Best Projects Award Winners 2020

Aileen Cho, ENR's senior transportation editor, is a native of Los Angeles and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times. Many of her experiences with engineers and contractors have inspired material for her alternative theater productions way, way off Broadway. For ENR, Aileen has traveled the world, clambering over bridges in China, touring an airport in Abu Dhabi and descending into dark subway tunnels in New York City. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun. Aileen is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Long Beach, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.

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