Marine biologist Dayne Buddo is having a difficulty containing his excitement after sighting four bottlenose dolphins inside the Kingston Harbour. But Buddo’s enthusiasm is mixed with anxiety for the polluted harbour to be cleaned in order to ensure the survival of the dolphins and other marine life.

“Thinking about all these magnificent mammals, these dolphins, you are actually encouraging their existence and their survival by having a good feeding ground in Kingston Harbour,” Buddo, who said he sighted the dolphins on July 27 in a lagoon of the Port Royal mangroves, told the Sunday Observer.

“It is a very good sign (dolphins in Kingston Harbour). It gives you more reasons to fix the Kingston Harbour,” he said. “The questions have always been posed, ‘why spend all this money to clean up this already polluted harbour?’ I believe it is worth all the effort.”

According to the marine biologist, the danger to the dolphins rests with the pollutants in the water, which fish consume and later pass on to the mammals.

“The pollutants in Kingston Harbour are often incorporated in the fish that the dolphins will eat, and hence pose a risk to the dolphins,” he said. “Kingston Harbour is an opportunity for them to feed, but it is also a potential risk because of the pollution.”

Buddo, though, sees hope in the Urban Development Corporation’s (UDC’s) con-struction of the Soapberry Sewerage Treatment Plant at Ferry in St Catherine as a major effort at stopping pollution of the harbour.

“The first step to cleaning up the Kingston Harbour is cutting off the source of pollution,” he said. “Once you fix the source of pollution, then you can look to clean up the damage. It does not make any sense spending money cleaning up somewhere and you still have the source of the problem. It is just a waste of money.”

Ground was broken for phase one of the US$50-million Soapberry Sewage Treatment Plant on January 31 this year, with then Prime Minister P J Patterson indicating that it would help to facilitate a reduction in the pollution of the harbour.

Funding for the project has been provided through the UDC and the National Housing Trust, which have put up US$4.8 million each, and the National Water Commission (NWC), which is injecting US$1 million. ASHTROM Building Systems is investing US$2 million and serves as contractor under an arrangement to design, build, own and operate the project. The additional US$38 million required to see the project through to fruition has been secured through a loan from the National Commercial Bank.

The new plant is to allow for the transportation of sewage flow by new sewer mains, including a 30-inch main and 40-inch main respectively from Western and Greenwich – the two main sewage plants in the Corporate Area, which are said to be dysfunctional.

The NWC is to have responsibility for delivering the sewage to collection points. From there, the Central Wastewater Treatment Company (CWTC) – the new entity formed by the partners in the venture – will assume responsibility for treatment. Specifically, the CWTC will provide the capacity to treat 18 million gallons of sewage per day.

Buddo, along with a team of researchers from the UWI and the Institute of Jamaica, will be doing their own part to rid the harbour of pollutants and organisms that could prove detrimental to local biological diversity. They are to undertake research on ballast water as a source of marine invasive species in the Kingston Harbour.

Ballast water is taken on board ships to facilitate their stability at sea. Unfortunately, it is believed to be one of the key mediums for the transfer of marine invasive species, such as the green mussel, which compete with local marine biological diversity for survival.

Their investigations, funded in part by a $3.449-million grant from the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica, will see Buddo and his team collecting samples of ballast water from the Kingston Harbour for analysis. The results are to be used to inform local policy and legislation on the treatment of ballast water.

Buddo, who was recently appointed honorary research fellow in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of the West Indies, Mona, is very excited about the project.

“It’s been a long time since I have seen dolphins in Kingston Harbour,” he said. “It is very heart warming. It motivates me to do more work in Kingston Harbour, to get rid of these bad pollutants.”

The pollution of the harbour has been red flagged for attention from as far back as 1989 when Patterson was appointed minister of development, planning and production. Stakeholders were, however, only recently able to move on the Soapberry project as a first step to dealing with the pollution, since the funds were not forthcoming, as Patterson noted in January.

Among the problems affecting the harbour, as identified by the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA), is urbanisation, with some 800,000 of the island’s 2.6 million residents living in areas where their activities can impact the ecology of the harbour.

This is a reality to which Buddo has attested.

“The problem with Kingston Harbour is that you develop a surrounding community to house, for instance, 500 people but people add on to their houses and people moving in from rural areas, perhaps doubling what the sewerage plant can manage. You then have under-treated and sometimes untreated sewage being released in Kingston harbour,” he said.

“Adding sewage to water increases growth of algae. When things die, they respire because they are decomposing and that basically consumes all the oxygen and starves fish and other marine life of oxygen,” he added.

The harbour also has the problem of its landlocked configuration and what NEPA has described as a “relatively small tidal prism”. This means that the tide removes only about a foot of surface water while the harbour – the seventh largest in the world – is 60 feet at its deepest point.

Buddo, meanwhile, imagines a time when dolphins can cavort freely and safely inside the Kingston Harbour allowing Jamaicans to enjoy their frolicsome behaviour.

“Imagine walking along the waterfront in downtown or on the sand at Hellshire, and watching dolphins at play,” the marine biologist said. “Imagine taking a trip to Lime Cay on Sundays with your children and being escorted by a group of dolphins playing with the bow wave of the boat. There is nothing better than seeing dolphins in the wild, and may I stress, in the wild – free to do whatever they would like to do.”

Added Buddo: “All we need in Jamaica is strong urban planning and a bit of foresight. Let’s make the Kingston Harbour a point of conversation, not about the pollution, but about the wonderful place that it can be. It can happen!”

williamsp@jamaicaobserver.com