Dear Editor,

The Government has been touting China Harbour Engineering Company’s (CHEC) “new” plan to dam the Rio Cobre as the best thing since sliced bread, but this is really nothing new.

Over 40 years ago, as a young engineer beginning my career, I heard of these plans and was told that investigations had been done and that they had not been found to be feasible; to the best of my recollection, because of faulting and porosity of the rocks.

I have heard that from as far back as the 1950s or 1960s investigations into the building of dams on the Rio Cobre and its tributaries had been done. As a result of the recent declarations that marvellous things were coming down the pipeline I asked a few older engineers about the investigations. The recollection of senior civil engineer Cowell Lyn is that either of the international firms Howard Humphries and Co and Ewbank and Partners were involved in doing work for the National Water Commission in this regard and that the firm of Engineering Sales Ltd, under George Lechler Snr, (now quite elderly) drilled the rock cores.

I spoke to George Lechler on Friday and he remembered drilling cores at the site of the old dam — which was used for the hydro station that powered the tram cars of yesteryear — and at Harker’s Hall, which I remember was proposed for the location of a dam and is on the Tom’s River tributary of the Rio Cobre. A disturbing recollection was that there might have been sand found in the cores.

He told me that he had passed on the borehole logs (which are the analyses of the cores pulled up from the boreholes) to Jentech Consultants Ltd a number of years ago.

Now, I find it quite distasteful for the Government to be essentially shouting that CHEC is going to solve our water and other problems by damming the Rio Cobre without — to the best of my knowledge -— even asking the engineers of the NWC (a government body) and the Jamaica Institution of Engineers. It’s like so many things; if it’s imported, it must be superior.

They ought to do some checking for the borehole logs; save some time and money before drilling new cores. Sometimes I think we’d be better off if we had engineers running the Government, like the Chinese had a few years ago.

Howard Chin, PE

Member, Jamaica Institution of Engineers

hmc14@cwjamaica.com