
By Robert A. Emmanuel
The government is to increase its offshore sand mining operations in order to sustain the construction industry.
Cabinet yesterday reported that there has been a dwindling of resources, particularly sand and other aggregates used in the construction of homes and buildings.
Chief of Staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, Lionel Hurst, explained that plans were underway to ensure that there is a “sufficient amount of sand to enable construction”.
According to Hurst, there continues to be an increase in offshore sand mining. He said additional resources were also being obtained from Dominica, Montserrat and Guyana—the country’s main suppliers of construction sand.
He explained that dredging work was already taking place at Crabbs to ensure an increase in the cement brought onto the island.
“As you know, we have dredged a deeper channel that leads to Crabbs where the vessel bearing cement normally discharges its cargo and we have dredged that channel a little deeper,” he said.
Hurst also spoke about the work being carried out at the quarries to ensure construction can continue at its current pace and to reduce theft.
“We have purchased additional equipment to work at the quarries; we were having a problem with theft—people actually stealing the supplies that were intended to be transferred from the quarries to government sites.
“We have put in some controls in order to reduce that but always when there is collaboration between an employee and someone intends on getting valuable assets at no cost, it sometimes requires even more vigilance,” he explained.
Hurst was asked what environmental impact assessments (EIA) had been carried out in advance of the dredging work. He said an EIA had been undertaken and referred reporters to the Department of Environment for details. Observer has reached out to environmental officials but did not receive information up to news time.
Sand mining is a highly valuable but unsustainable activity, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) reported this month.
“The scale of environmental impacts of shallow sea mining activities and dredging is alarming, including biodiversity, water turbidity, and noise impacts on marine mammals,” said Pascal Peduzzi, Director of Global Resource Information Database-Geneva at UNEP.
A report released earlier this month by new global data platform, Marine Sand Watch, found that some six billion tonnes of sand is being extracted annually from the floor of the world’s oceans, causing irreparable damage to seabed animals and plants.