CONSIDERATIONS FOR SEA OUTFALLS DESIGN AND INSTALLATION IN DIFFICULT SITES

摘要

Chile is a long and narrow country located in South America. With 4500 kilometers in the Pacific Ocean coast, a great part of the cities are placed near the shoreline. From 1986, this advantage had been used to install many sea outfalls as a sanitary engineering solution to solve the waste water disposal management. Our shore line, oriented north-south direction, produces extreme exposure to storms from the north and strong winds from southwest, in particular during spring time. For that reason, strong and high waves are common in our coast, which should be considered in design and construction of outfalls. On the other hand, our rocky coast with variable thickness and normally cover with sedimentary layer, will require of explosive handle to trench pipelines on surf zone, that some time is long. Moreover, seismic and tsunami risk is high, due to interaction border between American and Nazca tectonic plate, parallel to our shore line. In this paper, issues mentioned above are discussed, as it influence in engineering design of outfalls and forcing up to develop our own construction methods, many times.