Port city officials begin inspecting granite quarry sites

The Megapolis Ministry, Colombo Port City and the project contractor China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) have begun inspections of the quarries that will be supplying material for the Port City project.

According to the SEIA (supplementary EIA), only licensed quarries can be used for the supply and the inspection tours are to ensure that all the conditions stipulated in the environment approvals are properly met, according to a media release from the CHEC Port City Colombo (Pvt) Ltd, the project company.

The first of the visits made by the team of officials was led by Nihal Fernando, Deputy Director General of the UDA and Director of the Port City Development Project on November 16. The team included representatives from the Ministry of Megapolis, UDA, CHEC Port City Colombo (Pvt) Ltd (the project company) and CHEC. The visit was made to licensed quarries located in Meegoda and Korathota. Ms. Piyusha Gunasekara, Deputy Project Director and Deputy Director of the UDA and Bimal Priyantha, Project Engineer were also amongst the visiting team.

“Out of the total 250 quarries located in the districts of Colombo, Gampaha and Kalutara, only 11 quarries will be used for the supply of quarry material for the Port City Project. According to the report, when considering the total existing licensed quarries in the three districts - Colombo, Gampaha and Kalutara, the volume of rock to be obtained from the identified quarries, work out to only 7 per cent and 2.3 per cent of the capacity of quarries in Colombo and Gampaha, respectively, and zero per cent from Kalutara, as the project does not expect to source quarry material from this district. Therefore, the project will only use 4.4 per cent of all existing quarries in these districts,” the release said.

The SEIA done by experts has also analysed traffic related impacts in transporting quarry material to the construction site. Transport hours have been divided into two sessions that avoid peak hours of the day. In the first session, the loading of trucks is to be completed by 6 pm the previous day and they would be parked at the quarry site. The first batch of loaded trucks will start their journey at 4 am from their respective quarry sites and reach the port gate before 7 am. The SEIA has confirmed that there is facility for