Big port plan has rocky future

UNCRITICAL boosters of the proposed Townsville port expansion will surely sober up when they realise how much rock and fill will need to be transported through the city to the waterfront reclamation site.

PoTL’s 2013 EIS document shows 6,830,000 tonnes of armour and fill rock will be needed for breakwaters, revetments and bund walls.

Much of that would come from the port’s newly approved Granitevale quarry in the foothills of Herveys Range about 50km from the CBD.

The quarry will build a new road through the back of Kelso to connect to Riverside Drive and thence the Ring Road.

But there’s more. The EIS was superseded in 2016 by an additional EIS which outlined a 50 per cent increase in reclamation ( to 152 ha) requiring a 17 per cent increase in armour and rock fill. This brings the rock requirement to just under eight million tonnes.

But there’s more still. Once the dredging and reclamation is finished, a one metre deep layer of compacted fill will then be imported to cap the site so structures can be placed on the unstable “spoil” – at least another million tonnes to be trucked in.

So about nine million tonnes of rock and fill will be brought through suburbia to the waterfront over a period of years in ( nominally) 30- tonne loads.

The port says it wants to get trucks off the Bruce Highway.

Their $ 1.6 billion project will put 300,000 new truck trips onto the streets of Townsville. H. O. McCOLL,

Nelly Bay.