Thursday, March 28, 2024

New lagoon

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FOR YEARS that discharge from the Holetown Lagoon has been an annoyance to residents and tourists in the area.
And it’s as regular as clockwork – as long as there is a heavy rainfall event, the water, complete with its natural debris and piles of garbage, will breach the sand that keeps it penned in and will discolour the usual pristine waters along the Platinum Coast.
But when the fluidiser is put in, experts and technicians from the Coastal Zone Management Unit (CZMU) say that system of pipes would reduce those large-scale breach events.
Director of the CZMU Dr Lorna Inniss admits the completion of the fluidiser is about the only part of the Holetown Improvement Project that was outstanding.
But the noisy work will not start until after the busy Crop-Over tourist season has ended.
“We won’t restart the work on the fluidiser until August because during the Crop Over season the hotels in that area will have quite a high occupancy,” she said, adding that the CZMU was willing to compromise with the businesses and hotels in the area.
She explained the reason the fluidiser project has been taking so long was because it was a totally new design idea.
“Nobody has tried this yet and when I say nobody, I mean across the globe. Our engineers are international engineers and they have been trying this from scratch. As we have been going and developing the design, [it] has been changing to make sure that we end up with as good a design as we could possibly have,” she explained.
Currently the sand builds up at the mouth of the lagoon – the berm – and prevents the stream discharge from exiting into the sea in manageable levels.
When it rains, the water level in the lagoon rises and eventually bursts through the sand, discharging the filthy water into the sea.
“What we would prefer is that it [the water] continues to trickle out all the time instead of a large-scale pollutant load at one time.”
And this is where the fluidiser comes in.
It will be a network of pipes in the sand of the berm that will feed water into the sand lowering it to a manageable level and thereby reducing such massive eruptions into the sea.
Meanwhile, Inniss revealed the Improvement project was about 95 per cent complete – the lateral access had been finished and the stabilisation has been done.
Coastal Zone engineers were now monitoring the area and tweaking any areas that might need modification.
 

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