This paper present several cases in the Port of Rotterdam where both in the design and construction phase several different did not marched as expected. These cases are interesting for both the design as well the construction phase of a project. People will make mistakes however the mistakes describes in this paper have to be judged in time as not always everything was understood during the design and construction and the people of that time still these huge structures.

The stability of any structure is an important aspect in civil engineering. This aspect is the subject of the researched quay wall at the Amazonehaven, port of Rotterdam. The quay wall with a relieving platform structure had in various section, over the entire 900m length of the quay, large deformations at the toe of the combined wall. The purpose was to analyse and quantify the influence of the deformed combined wall on the stability of the quay wall, its service lifetime. To obtain a better insight into the concept of stability, analytical methods based on the Blum theory, beam on elastic foundation method and finite element method using Plaxis 3D were applied and compared. The finite element method, Plaxis 3D, proved to be a better method to investigate the quay wall. Plaxis 3D takes into account the 3-dimensional effects of the quay wall and considers the actual soil behaviour during calculation which is a sophisticated manner of modelling a quay wall. A calibration model (which is the actual designed quay wall) and a series of models with various penetration depth of the combined wall are modelled. Also, a safety analysis of the soil parameters were applied to the various models.