The first construction task of the Ferry Terminal Turku project, Pier S1, has been completed and handed over to the port. A ship will be moored to it already in March 2027.
There is a new element in the port: a long and wide pier supported by massive, up to 50-metre long steel piles driven into the seabed. Since a passenger ship to Sweden is of considerable size and mass, the same is naturally required of the ship’s pier.
Marko Saarelma, Project Manager at marine construction specialist Terramare Boskalis, the pier contractor, estimates that Pier S1 is the largest of its kind in the Baltic Sea. It is 250 metres long and 25 metres wide.
“Works of this size are, in general, rare in ports. In Turku, a brand new pier was last constructed 30 years ago. Pier repairs have of course been done regularly.”
The pier needs to be wide because the passenger gangway from the terminal to the ship will also be built above it.
A site of large numbers
For Terramare’s young marine constructors, Site Manager Sami Donner and Foreman Eero Taskinen, the construction site has been a good learning environment.
“During the busiest phase, there were fifty men working on the eight blocks of the pier. In addition to the piling work, for example, large concrete pours were done on the site. The pouring of the scour protection plate that protects the pier from the ship’s prop wash required a lot of diving work”, Donner describes.
The pier construction utilised a work bridge, formed by connecting three pontoons in a chain. These housed the heavy machinery needed in marine construction.
“The largest single lift was done when the hydraulic drive ramp was brought onto the pier. It was brought on site on a pontoon and lifted manually from land using a five-hundred tonne crane”, Taskinen says.
“The construction of the pier took 12,000 cubic metres of concrete, a million kilos of rebar and 13.5 kilometres of steel piles”, Donner calculates.
On land, underground, in the air and in the sea
Ramboll CM’s role was the management and steering of the project planning.
“Since the old blueprints of the area could not be fully trusted, we were a little worried about what the ground might hold. However, we did not run into any major surprises. The old structures could be cleared out to make way for new ones”, says Jarno Lähdeviita, construction management consultant and infrastructure supervisor for Ramboll’s sub-consultant Valvox Turku.
Nowadays, the documentation of construction is naturally at a completely different level than in the past. The documentation of the pier construction utilised, among others, drone footage shot by Aleksi Heikkilä.
Safety coordinator Saara Valtonen points out that a detailed occupational safety plan was followed on site and the project was a success in terms of safety.
“Anyone that, for example, worked closer than a couple of metres to the edge of the pier had to wear an inflatable life vest”, Valtonen explains.
Pier S1 will soon be open
The Pier S1 project was handed over to the port of Turku on 15 June 2026. It will officially be taken into use in March 2027, when the first Tallink Silja ship will be moored there.
“The next berth project in the port of Turku, the Quay S2 project, began this spring. It consists of refurbishing the quay currently in use by Tallink Silja and is an even bigger project than Pier S1”, Lähdeviita explains.
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