 click to enlarge | MEDIA RELEASE 19 July 2013 Alliance to Save Hinchinbrook Inc. OPEN LETTER IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST to all the owners at "Port Hinchinbrook", the interested public, and the Queensland and Commonwealth Governments Port Hinchinbrook Services is in provisional liquidation. Williams Corporation, the development company, is under voluntary administration. Previous developers Tekin Australia (Resort Village Cardwell) were also wound up, in 1990. So what's the problem? The short story is that "Port Hinchinbrook's" waterways cannot be kept navigable by dredging, because of an unchangeable characteristic of the Hinchinbrook Channel coast: "severe siltation". This problem is inherent in the site; it is not caused by cyclones. |
"Port Hinchinbrook" is situated at Oyster Point among former mangrove shoals and melaleuca marshes on the shores of the shallow, muddy, fast-flowing Hinchinbrook Channel.
- Hinchinbrook Channel is one big silt-trap for the Herbert, Seymour and Burdekin Rivers
- The dredge spoil ponds are full. No new spoil can be added until the old spoil is removed.
- No-one, including Port Hinchinbrook Services, disputes the prohibitive cost of removing the old spoil.
This outcome was known from the start:
click to enlarge
In 1977 the Queensland Department of Harbours and Marine emphatically rejected the site as "unsuitable": "The area at Oyster Point should not be developed as a boat harbour" (Chapter 2 Summary and Recommendations (8)), because of its lack of naturally deep water, its location in a catchment, and its severe siltation necessitating a very high frequency of dredging.
17 years of accumulated, unusable dredge spoil on adjacent Lot 170 bear witness to these warnings.
By bluster and bullying, Keith Williams staved off the day of reckoning. Relying on public ignorance and avoiding scrutiny, he was adept at distracting attention from the insurmountable engineering problems of turning an unsuitable site into a saleable commodity.
Successive developers, purchasers, investors and speculators have invested in good faith on the representations of "Port Hichinbrook’s" proponents. Any gains made through these investments have arguably been undermined by prohibitively costly dredging and underlying acid sulphate soils.
Our interest in publicising this information at this time is to ensure that the public has the benefit of factual, documented information (see attached) relevant to the "Port Hinchinbrook" site; and that the coast of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area is protected from further insult.
Interested persons should demand that any new arrangements be exposed to a high level of scrutiny for factual content, business transparency, and freedom from impacts on the natural environment and the public purse.
17 years of accumulated, unusable dredge spoil on adjacent Lot 170 bear witness to these warnings.
By bluster and bullying, Keith Williams staved off the day of reckoning. Relying on public ignorance and avoiding scrutiny, he was adept at distracting attention from the insurmountable engineering problems of turning an unsuitable site into a saleable commodity.
Successive developers, purchasers, investors and speculators have invested in good faith on the representations of "Port Hichinbrook’s" proponents. Any gains made through these investments have arguably been undermined by prohibitively costly dredging and underlying acid sulphate soils.
Our interest in publicising this information at this time is to ensure that the public has the benefit of factual, documented information (see attached) relevant to the "Port Hinchinbrook" site; and that the coast of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area is protected from further insult.
Interested persons should demand that any new arrangements be exposed to a high level of scrutiny for factual content, business transparency, and freedom from impacts on the natural environment and the public purse.
| See pdf here for full version and summary explanation: 1. COASTAL ENGINEERING REPORTS 1977 TO 1994: quotes 2. "PORT HINCHINBROOK": IS A MARINA VIABLE? quotes 3. DREDGING NOT FEASIBLE IN HINCHINBROOK CHANNEL: Lucinda, Dungeness, Cardwell jetty. |
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