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Maritime Accessibility
The port of Antwerp is located on the river Scheldt, thus the vessels calling the port, are dependent on the river.
On March 11th 2005, a Third Memorandum of Understanding that clears the way for deepening of the Western Scheldt was signed by Minister Kris Peeters for Flanders and Ministers Karla Peijs, Cees Veerman and State Secretary Melanie Schultz van Haegen for the Netherlands.
This doesn’t mean the whole of the river Scheldt needs to be dredged. Overall, the depth of the river is amply sufficient. It suffices to scrape some local shoals, the so-called bars. These bars are each deepened with 1.4 m.
The dredging works started at the end of 2007 and were finalized by the end of 2010. The successful negotiation of this Understanding will allow an average tidal independent draft of 13.60 metres and tidal windows sailing up and downriver up to 16.00 metres.