Gladstone Ports Corporation CEO Leo Zussino has launched a passionate defence of the Western Basin Dredging Project.
Speaking at a media conference yesterday, Mr Zussino said he understood community anxiety over the extraordinary number of marine animal deaths this year, but all the scientific evidence so far pointed to depleted seagrass meadows being the cause, rather than dredging.
Mr Zussino said he was concerned the public had not been made fully aware that there have been marine animal deaths along most of the Queensland coast this year. He also emphasised that scientific evidence showed those deaths were almost certainly due to seagrass being damaged by the floods.
Some community members and commercial fishermen have been seething in their belief that the dredging project had caused turbidity and damage to seagrass levels, leading to marine mammal deaths and damage to fish stocks.
Mr Zussino said that view was flawed, since initial dredging only began recently and there has only been some 395,000 cubic metres removed. Regular dredging in the harbour since 1996 has removed about 100,000 per year, without any identified impact on marine wildlife
Capricorn Conservation Council (CCC) Acting Coordinator Chantelle James told The Observer CCC was opposed to the scale of development involved in the LNG projects, but agreed it was likely that the main cause of marine animal deaths was the floods damaging seagrass meadows.
?If the monitoring and science say it?s not the dredging, then we are happy to go with that,? she said. ?I can?t comment on the science (presented by GPC today) because I have not seen it.?
Ms James said CCC?s main concern was that there were a combination of small factors, possibly including dredging, which are combining to put pressure on marine wildlife.
??We do need to be careful not to just blame the dredging for all the deaths. (But) CCC asks, accumulatively what are all the issues (impacting marine wildlife). What can happen when you have a numbner of threats combined together, is it can be exhasperated.?
(gladstoneobserver)
Source: gladstoneobserver, September 2, 2011; Image: dip.qld
Source: http://www.lngworldnews.com/gladstone-ports-ceo-defends-lng-dredging-australia/
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