Work set to start on Belize City dredging

If you’ve been to Fort Point or the Southern Foreshore of Belize City over the last few days, you would have noticed a massive dredge moored in the harbour. That piece of machinery is the key element in a thirty-seven million dollar project that will improve the capabilities of the port and Haulover Creek, as well as reclaim enough swamp to provide hundreds of families with land for housing. Manager of the Belgian/ United Arab Emirate joint venture that has been hired to carry out the project is Filip Morobè. He says the work consists of two main parts.

Filip Morobè

“The first part, is the dredging of the Haulover Creek, where we are now. That will take about one month as from this weekend and will finish half of October. The second part is the dredging of a deep-water channel to the existing long pier in the Loyola port. That will take from mid of October until February of next year. As is now, the trough in the harbour is only about five metres. That is a very reduced trough and so the purpose of the channel we are going to dredge, is to increase this dept from five metres to ten meters, about thirty-two feet. That will allow ships to come in with far larger troughs than the ships which actually come in.”

Ann-Marie Williams

“The materials that the dredging will produce, what will it be used for?”

Filip Morobè

“All the materials that will be dredged, as well as the materials from the Haulover Creek and port, will be pumped to a pipe line system to an area behind the port and the customs building. There in the last two or three months, one of the subcontractors has prepared an area of about three to four hundred acres, with dikes around it and all the materials will be pumped into that area.”

The level of the filled land will be raised between one and two metres. The work should be completed within six months.