THE public acceptance of the idea for the sewage plant at Soapberry, where the Rio Cobre enters the bay, came at a seminar at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, organised by the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) to review options for rehabilitating the harbour.

“The best solution is to centralise the sewage treatment for Kingston with reuse of the effluent by the Sugar Company of Jamaica instead of the discharging of treated or untreated sewage to Kingston Harbour and Hunts Bay,” argued environmental engineer, Chris Burgess, who made a presentation at the seminar.

Later, NEPA’s executive director, Franklin McDonald, placed the US$150-million price tag on the proposed plant and indicated that the National Water Commission (NWC) was well ahead in negotiating for the loans and signing contracts for the facility.

“Eighty million (dollars) (of the projected cost) will come from the Japanese Environment Fund, $30 million from the Inter-American Development Bank, and the balance from a private sector partner,” McDonald told the Observer .

The NWC was “close to signing the contract”, he said.

Kingston Harbour, the world’s seventh largest natural harbour, has been known for decades to be dead, with the presence of little marine life. It is hardly recommended for recreational swimming.

The major part of the problem, studies have shown, is that at least 20 million gallons of untreated sewage is discharged into the harbour daily, plus another 1.5 million tonnes of sediment.

At present, only a handful of the 25 sewage plants in Kingston and St Andrew actually work and in fact only a few areas of the capital, particularly downtown and New Kingston are fully sewered.

The project, McDonald explained, would, therefore, involve connecting the whole city to the new system.

The issue of untreated sewage apart, a recent study by the University of the West Indies indicated higher than acceptable levels of metals like lead, arsenic and mercury in the fish found in the harbour. Increasing levels of pesticides — from the run-off of rivers — were also found in the harbour’s water and fish — which the study says pose a potential health hazard to humans and birds who consume fish.

Several options for cleaning the harbour have been debated for years, including engineering techniques for flushing.

Yesterday, engineers, environmentalists, fishermen and other interested persons gathered at the Chemistry Lecture Theatre at Mona to debate the three main ones:

* The channel option. With this proposal a bridge, similar to the Portmore Causeway, would be built to replace a section of the road on Norman Manley Boulevard, near the Harbour View roundabout, to link the water of the Kingston Harbour and that of what is dubbed the “big sea” on the eastern side of Palisadoes, the peninsular that almost encloses the harbour.

* The “immersed tube option”. This would involve the laying of a large pipe beneath the road surface to link both bodies of water — the harbour and the big sea; and

* The “pumping option”. In this case, water would be pumped from the harbour into the big sea.

The underlying idea of these proposals was to get the water in the harbour circulating, so as to enable the flushing of the harbour.

However, none of the three, according to those present, would solve the problem.

According to civil engineer Cowell Lyn, who is serving as consultant to the project, of these options the “immersed tube” solution had the most support but he argued that it would not improve the water quality in the harbour.

“From an engineering point of view, if we want to improve, the flushing immersed would be the most practical form of connecting the two water bodies,” he said. “It is the option that would allow natural interchange, without having the high operating costs of energy expenses — whether electricity, wind or solar. It would not, however, improve the water quality,” he told the Sunday Observer.

In the case of the pumping option, Lyn said, experts had ruled it unfeasible.

“He told us that the volume of water we would be dealing with in the Kingston Harbour is much too large to be thinking of pumping as a feasible option,” Lyn added, explaining the position of one consultant.

Burgess, a civil and environmental engineer, argued that like the other two, the channel option would not work.

“It would make the water quality outside the harbour, which is currently near pristine, worse and the shoreline inside the harbour more vulnerable to hurricane waves,” Burgess told the Sunday Observer, underlining a point he made during an earlier presentation.

In fact, Dr Dale Webber, a marine biologist who had done extensive work in the Kingston Harbour, warned that enhanced flushing would probably just transfer the problem of its pollution from one place to another.

“If we are going to release Kingston Harbour waters in its present state anywhere down the coast, we are exporting our pollution all the way down to the Hellshire coast with devastating effects on our water quality, our sea-grass and our corals,” he warned.

Yesterday’s seminar was the fourth hosted by NEPA since last December as part of efforts to revitalise an Action plan, developed for the harbour in 1998. About 2,800 registered fishermen who use the harbour have been voicing their fears since then, that their livelihoods were at stake because of the pollution. In fact, the production or catches declined from 1,526 metric tonnes in 1998 to 1,100 in 1999.