Prof Jacques Bezuidenhout accurately brought us up to speed on the events that took place from the year dot to the advent of the Covid-19 disaster (“Mens het groot impak op baai”, Thursday 1 December).
Very little infrastructure development has taken place in Small Bay since the completion of the iron ore/oil terminal in 1976. The most significant is the Sunrise Energy LPG project in Big Bay.
The reason is obvious. Saldanha is not a natural deep water port. To construct the ore terminal here, we were not blessed with a Norwegian Fjord. We had to build a breakwater between Hoedjiespoint and Marcus Island and a 3 km long access causeway to the ore jetty. If we had taken the trouble to do a thorough seabed investigation the presence of hardpan calcrete would have probably chased the project up the coast, closer to the mine.
Boskalis, a locally-based dredging company took the trouble to carry out a comprehensive seabed investigation. Bokkie van Dyk and myself spent months probing the seabed alongside Pieter Giesberger from Boskalis. He came to the conclusion, quite correctly, that there wasn’t a dredging fleet on the planet that would be able to complete the job. He was quite correct.
Salcon was scheduled to complete the dredging in 10 months with the Queen of Holland (cutter suction) and the Humber River (trailer). It took two and a half years with two cutter-suction dredgers and five trail dredgers just to complete the spending beach breakwater. The 10 million m³ of fill required for the approach causeway had to be carried in by truck from the land.
After the dredging fleet had left town it took another two years for SA Diving Services to blast the navigation channel down to the required depth.
A cursory look at the attached hydrographic chart confirms the natural sufficient depth for an ore terminal only occurs in the North Bay, where there is no wave energy protection.
These days dredgers are more competent than they were in the ’70s. Even in the 1990s the URSA, a cutter-suction dredger owned by Royal Boskalis Westminster NV performed as anticipated for the Mossgas approach channel dredging.
Perhaps the time is right to take a second look at the viability of excavating an inland port for Saldanha.
