A FORMAL application has been lodged with the Department of the Marine for the extraction of up to 800,000 cubic metres of sand and gravel from two sites in upper and lower Cork Harbour, for the £90 million Lee Tunnel project.
The application, together with an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), has been made by Tarmac Walls, the joint venture contractor for the project. The sand and gravel will be used to back fill the trough when the tunnel sections have been laid in the trench across the Lee, linking Mahon to Little Island.
While the company claims that there will be minimum disruption of fishing at the upper harbour site in the Lough Mahon estuary it accepted yesterday that the ecosystem in the lower harbour site, which will be in two sections to the east of Spike Island, would be affected and that it could take up to three years for marine animals to regenerate naturally.
The Cork Environmental Alliance has protested against what it described as a continuing disruption of marine life in the harbour. It said it was considering taking a case to the European Commission because of the difficulty in getting full disclosure about the project.
Yesterday Mr Robin Daniels, the project manager, said the proposed dredging of the sand and gravel was similar to normal maintenance carried out in the shipping lanes in Cork Harbour, and that no significant environmental impact would result.
At a news conference the company said the two sections of the lower harbour site had been extensively dredged in the early 1980s for the construction of the Ringaskiddy deepwater berth, but marine life, including crab and shrimp, had regenerated fully.
The EIS, which was carried out by consulting engineers, Fehily Timoney, Weston of Cork, and which included ecological sampling, sediment analysis and computer modelling, suggested that a similar recovery would occur after the latest dredging programme had been completed.
Mr Eamon Timoney, a member of the consulting firm, said the main findings were that there would be no long term negative environment impact; that the short term impact would be the destruction of the draft net fishing season in Lough Mann for approximately 60 days during the 1997 fishing season; and that crab and shrimp would be forced out of the dredging area in the lower harbour for up to three years.
In all, the dredging will take four to five months to complete and it is expected to begin next spring. Work on the tunnel, which will carry 28,000 vehicles per day initially, will be completed in mid 1998. It is expected the volume of traffic will increase to 40,000 vehicles per day within 20 years.
The Cork Environmental Alliance said yesterday that the company's harbour activities were having a detrimental effect on fishing and marine life, despite reassurances to the contrary.
Last month the CEA led a flotilla of small boats to a point in the harbour, near Roche's Point, where Tarmac Walls has a licence to dump silt from the site on which the tunnel is being constructed.