It’s a bizarre situation, but according to experts in the corrosion field, it’s a picture little changed over centuries of operations.

Bill Wilcox of underwater civil engineering and commercial diving contractor Norfolk Marine is particularly critical.

“In general ports around the world have until very recently paid little if any heed to corrosion control either during the design, construction or general day-to-day maintenance of the structure. During the design and construction stage this was mainly down to cost constraints combined with a lack of knowledge and/or interest. Splash on something thick, black, sticky and cheap and forget about what cannot be seen!

“Again during day-to-day maintenance what could not be seen, often the most important parts of the structure, was not maintained. This was not help by the fact that the thick, black, sticky cheap stuff which had been poorly applied often just acted as a screen behind which the corrosion could do its worse, unseen and unhindered.”

However, thankfully an exception to this poor picture can be seen in the US where the Army Corps Engineers has studied and developed many methods of protection and repair of marine structures since the 1970s.

Glenn English, managing director of UK-based supplier of corrosion protection equipment MCPS, agrees with Mr Wilcox.

“Natural disasters cost the US economy $17bn a year while corrosion costs the US $276bn a year. It is evident that all areas of industry do not put enough emphasis on corrosion control.”

In the past, UK port designers simply increased the thickness of the steel structures and called it ‘corrosion allowance’, according to Mr English, but this did not allow for the bacteria that advances corrosions under the waterline – the real threat to jetties and quays now known as microbiologically influenced corrosion (MIC) or accelerated low water corrosion.

While cathodic protection is proven to greatly reduce the corrosion rate and is written in the specification for most newbuilds in the UK, whether or not cathodic protection is installed into port structures varies throughout the world, often at the discretion of the port owner.

“The industry as a whole does not budget enough and over a third of corrosion costs (about $100bn in the US) could be prevent through existing technology,” says Mr English. “Prevention saves lives and valuable resources that could be spent on other things.”

Mr Wilcox goes even further, stating that most ports would not acknowledge the risk of a corrosion-related problem, let alone budget for it.

“Budgets are for machinery, plant and painting the offices, with the unknown remaining unconsidered.”

As a result, he criticises operators for demanding cure, rather than considering corrosion prevention techniques.

“Prevention was often given lip service at the construction stage with little if any quality control procedures being established for coatings application to steel structures or for the control of concrete placement on concrete structures.”

Normally, operators approach contractors only after they have uncovered a severe problem, usually after a recommended maintenance program has been ignored.

Part of the problem can be traced to the lack of national and international regulations to encourage the prevention of corrosion in port structures. And those rules that are in place are often not enforced with any degree of consistency.

Says Norfolk Marine’s Mr Wilcox: “The regulations that do exist mainly covered the construction phase and maintenance is left to the owner of the port. Where regulations are in place with regard to methods of construction and the type and quality of materials to be used, control during construction is of a self regulatory nature either undertaken by the contractor or by the client’s representative who has to be a jack of all trades and so a true master of none.

“With both the contractor and the client’s representative’s main concern being the budget for the project, corrosion control issues such as inspecting coatings surface preparation and application techniques, are often overlooked as items such as when piles and fender units arrive on site they look black and shiny and so are passed as fit for purpose.”

Norfolk Marine is well place to comment on these problems: it has been involved in the project management, design and installation of pile refurbishment and cathodic protection systems for the past decade.

Another problem arises when coatings that are damaged in the construction phase go unnoticed. It takes just a small scratch or chip in a specialist anti-corrosion coating to allow the rot to set in, unnoticed below the coating that remains.

While Mr Wilcox praises the increasing use of specialist inspectors to spot such anomalies, this trend has only become the norm recently and so many structures, sometimes under ten years old, have major problems waiting to be uncovered.

For his part, Mr English strongly believes that government should take on a greater role in improving corrosion control on a global level.

“I believe international and national authorities should be involved to make it compulsory for all quaysides and ports that support human activity to be adequately protected or we could have a major disaster on our hands very soon.”