Cork road network sufficient for traffic at proposed incinerator

The road network serving the site of a proposed €160 million incinerator at Ringaskiddy in Cork Harbour has more than adequate capacity to cater for the traffic that the facility will generate, Cork County Council has told a planning hearing in the facility.

According to Cork County Council Senior Executive Engineer for Traffic, Peter O'Donoghue, the road network serving the proposed site via the Jack Lynch Tunnel, the N40 South Ring Road and the N 28 to Ringaskiddy has a capacity to cater for 2,600 vehicles per hour at peak times.

However off peak, the road network has a spare capacity of 800 to 1,000 vehicles per hour and given that Indaver was projecting 160 truck journeys per day giving an extra 11 vehicles per hour, the incinerator would not contribute to traffic congestion during off peak hours.

“The existing capacity of the road network off peak is well able to cater for the traffic generated by Indaver,” said Mr O’Donoghue, adding that there should be no difficulty accommodating the extra traffic generated by the incinerator once it was managed so that it avoided peak traffic times.

Even allowing for the traffic volumes arising from the new Port of Cork facility in Ringaskiddy, which would generate an additional 130 vehicles per hour, there was still sufficient spare capacity off peak to cater for the extra 11 vehicles per hour generated by the incinerator, he said.

Traffic consultant for Indaver, Niall Harte of Arup had earlier confirmed that Indaver has already committed to a longer 14 hour opening period for waste acceptance between 6am and 8pm in order to mitigate the impact of traffic to the facility.

Mr Harte told the hearing that the additional traffic generated by the incinerator would amount to just 0.5 per cent of the daily traffic volumes passing through the Jack Lynch Tunnel linking the N40 with the N8 and the N25.

Risk of explosion

Earlier, Tom Leonard, a Hazard Identification expert with Byrne O'Cleirigh, Consultants for Indaver, played down suggestions that the proposed incinerator was at risk of explosion as happened at Indaver's incinerator at Stabroek near Antwerp on February 26th last.

Mr Leonard said the Antwerp plant dealt with heavy duty waste from the petrochemical industry including residues from the manufacture of weedkiller which was so viscous that it needed to be heated up to be transferred from the tanker to the plant for disposal.

During the transfer the material underwent an exothermic reaction and exploded but the proposed incinerator in Ringaskiddy would not be handling such waste while there were no plans to preheat materials so there was no chance of a similar explosion happening at the Cork facility, he said.

However Derry Chambers of the Cork Environmental Alliance which is opposed to the proposed incinerator, raised questions about what would happen if a fire happened outside the bunker area in Ringaskiddy where waste is received as happened in the Antwerp fire earlier this year.

Mr Chambers said that Indaver in its planning application revealed that it planned to have a fire water retention tank with 2,200 cubic metres capacity which would be sufficient to retain water used to fight a two hour fire but he questioned whether this was enough.

He pointed out that in 1993, a fire at the Hicksons chemical plant in Ringaskiddy lasted for six hours and firefighters used 6,819 cubic metres to bring it under control when Hicksons only Fire Water Retention Tank had a capacity of 1,136 cubic metres.

The fact that Hicksons did not have the capacity to store all the water used to fight the fire meant that contaminated water had to be pumped into Cork Harbour and he feared Indaver similarly didn’t have enough capacity to retain firewater in the event of a fire lasting more than two hours.

Rosie Cargin of Kinsale Environment Watch said that Indaver had done modelling to predict the outcome in certain scenarios but she wondered how the company would react if the unexpected happens.

“Why are we taking these risks if the unexpected can happen?”