Posted on May 21, 2018
The dumping of sewage sludge in deeper waters beyond the Kish Bank “might well serve as a model” for the current dredging of Dublin Port.
In a letter to The Irish Times earlier this week, Cormac F Lowth, a diver and member of the Maritime Institute of Ireland, suggests that the claims of Dublin Port Company’s chief regarding the effects of recent dredging operations in the bay “ignore the obvious”.
Dublin Port CEO Eamonn O’Reilly defended the dredging operations in the port, citing “the science available to measure its impact” in response to discontent among diving groups over the state of the water in Dublin Bay.
Divers concerned that the dredging is to blame for murky waters, which have seen all planned dives cancelled due to poor visibility, might now look further east for a potential answer to a question that’s left the bay’s crabs and lobsters “with an overcoat of silt on their backs”.
Lowth explains that dredging spoil such as that dumped at the Burford Bank at the edge of Dublin Bay contains estuarine mud and fluvial silt that “is not going to remain in toto on the top of this bank”.
“A glance at a tidal atlas for Dublin Bay is enough to convince one that much of anything that gets dumped near the mouth of the bay will get washed back in by the strong tidal currents,” writes Lowth. “This can surely be described as the maritime equivalent of defecating on your own doorstep.”
Source: Afloat
