SHIP MOTION STUDY FOR THE 2010 AND 2020 PLAN IN THE SAN PEDRO BAY, CALIFORNIA

Abstract

The Port of Long Beach, in cooperation with the Port of Los Angeles and the Corps of Engineers, has been working on the development of a Master Plan for the San Pedro Bay area. This Master Plan, nicknamed the "2020 Plan", is intended to project the Port's land and channel requirements through the year 2020. Any landfill expansion program would be implemented in phases throughout the life of the Master Plan. The initial phases of such a plan would greatly limit the ability of the Port to revise the future configuration of landfill phases, making it important for the Port to determine a final landfill configuration before implementing the early phases. In developing the 2020 Plan, the Port projected a need for approximately 2,600 acres of additional land. In attempting to turn this 2,600 acre figure into a landfill scheme, the controlling agencies had to take a number of factors into consideration, including (1) water quality and tidal circulation; (2) potential ship motion problems; (3) additional berths required for future development; (4) land and waterside transportation corridors required; (5) availability of dredge material for creating the land; (6) available areas for creating landfills; (7) efficiency of land usage in various configurations; (8) types of ships anticipated to use the new landfills; (9) types of terminals anticipated to be located on the new landfills. The Port of Long Beach developed two basic schemes which addressed the requirements listed above. In either case, the landfill configuration for the Port of Los Angeles remained the same. The first scheme (called the island scheme, Figure 1) had the advantage of more closely matching the proposed Port of Los Angeles development. Water quality and tidal circulation would be improved with this scheme. The second scheme (called the horseshoe scheme, Figure 2) created a channel on the Long Beach side which did not match the orientation of the channel on the Los Angeles side. This channel was better protected from wave forces than the island scheme, where ships would have to be berthed along the exposed southerly boundary.