From:TheBahamasWeekly.com
"Impacts of the Resorts World Bimini Cruise Ship Terminal"
By Gail Woon, EARTHCARE
Mar 18, 2014 - 6:25:38 PM
Photos used at presentation
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Full Text of Presentation by Gail Woon, Founder of EARTHCARE
to Information Session at Bimini Big Game Club Resort & Marina, Alicetown,
Bimini on March 15th, 2014:
Good
evening,
The cruise
ship terminal for Resorts World Bimini has been described as “necessary” to the
business plan. I will outline here
several reasons why that is a ludicrous statement.
First, let
me outline what the cruise ship terminal plan entails:
The plan is
to build a 1,000 foot pier terminal that will be wide enough for two vehicles
to pass each other comfortably. At the
end of this 1000 foot long structure will be the manmade “island”. The island will be made from 220,000 cubic
yards of your Crown Land prime ocean bottom that just happens to be right next
to 14 of your “prime dive sites”. The
reason for the idea is to let their too large for the island, cruise ship to be
able to come right up to the so-called island, which will house the Customs and
Immigration and a “beach club” house.
The MAIN
reason this delicate site was chosen, and the only reason that this incredibly
valuable biologically diverse site was chosen for destruction is simply because
it is closest to the casino and to the main road of Resorts World Bimini.
Let us look
at the history of the former Bimini Bay Resort which is still very much
influenced by the original developer, Gerardo Capo, the poster child for
unsustainable habitat destruction through ill thought out small island
megadevelopment. I use Mr. Capo as an
example when I teach young students about what should not be allowed to happen
in sensitive wetland areas that are the breadbasket of our all important
fisheries resource and our big draw for tourism, our natural Bahamian
environment.
Since the
start of the Bimini Bay Resort in the 90s, it has gone through much scrutiny
and controversy. However, in spite of
the controversy, Mr. Capo has been allowed to destroy over 160+ acres of healthy
mangrove wetlands area. Now, you might
say, oh that is useless swamp. Guess
what, that useless swamp is where a huge part of your fisheries resource
replenishes. And I have been in touch
with Bimini fishermen, not the tourists who come to fish, I mean the fishermen
and fisherwomen of Bimini, who fish here to make money to feed their
families. They are feeling this loss of
the mangroves. Since the destruction of
the mangrove forests, they have to go further and further out and fish longer
hours to get a day’s catch.
Photos used at presentation
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There is
more that I could say about that but since time is of the essence let me stick
to the topic at hand. In addition to the
mangrove annihilation, Mr. Capo was allowed to and is still dredging cheap
(free) fill from again, your Crown land, the ocean bottom in the North
Sound. Why was he allowed to do
this? Ask our previous and present
Governments. It is incredibly stupid, in
my humble opinion.
The North
Sound was a very important habitat for the nursery for the fisheries of
Bimini. Now it is scarred, and I fear,
will never be able to come back to the productivity it once had; it is now a
deep marina for megayachts.
The 220,000
cubic yards of ocean bottom that will be removed from the endangered reef
habitat is simply, so that they do not have to truck fill over from the North
Sound side to create the manmade island adjacent to the 1000 foot
terminal. I will go over the
sedimentation that this dredging will cause a little later.
The Bimini
Blue Coalition has gone on record in the newspapers and on the internet with
their “Better Plan for Bimini” which stated simply suggests that smaller
passenger vessels be used, say, 300-500 passenger capacity vessels, that can
dock at the existing Government dock. The Balaeria used to dock there with no
problem.
This plan
would negate the need for destroying the area of the proposed terminal and stop
the inevitable side damage that will be caused to the 14 Prime Dive Sites
adjacent to the terminal. Did I mention
that those 14 dive sites will likely be suffocated in the fine silt that will
be generated by the dredging exercise that is slated to begin, I heard, within
the next 3 weeks?
This
alternative plan would also include the local transportation professionals in
that they would be able to get a piece of the pie in being able to transport
passengers to RWB. Further the
passengers would have the opportunity to see Alice Town, before they get to RWB
and can decide if they want to leave RWB to see what the rest of Bimini has to
offer such as museums, the straw market, and the various restaurants that are
not on the RWB property.
220,000
cubic yards is equivalent to 5 football fields that are twenty feet deep. That is how much of your Crown land that will
be ripped from God’s ocean bottom, to build an artificial island to tie up some
megayachts and the Cruise ship.
Photos used at presentation
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Every time the cruise ship docks huge
amounts of coral killing silt will be stirred up to inevitably land on the
surviving corals. This silt will
suffocate those corals.
Let me remind
you of the importance of corals. A coral
reef habitat produces more food than an exactly the same sized agricultural
system, a farm.
DO NOT BE
FOOLED BY THE PUBLIC RELATIONS NONSENSE BEING GENERATED BY RWB. The only corals being moved are the small
ones that can be picked up by one person.
Transplanting corals is a very delicate operation that should only be
done by marine biology professionals.
The person in charge of the terminal construction and purporting himself
to be a specialist in corals is a marine engineer with no biological
background. This is the person who is
deciding the fate of our Bahamian endangered corals. 80% of the Caribbean’s corals have disappeared
due to many causes such as habitat destruction, pollution, and climate change. Do you really want to sacrifice the few
healthy corals the Bahamas has left so that a cruise ship can land closer to a
casino?? Also the large corals that
cannot be picked up by a person will be destroyed, Marked for Death.
Also there
are 2 alternate sites that would have been far less damaging to the coral
habitat where the cruise ship terminal could have been built without
desecrating our 14 important scuba diving coral reefs. One is North and one is South. Neither were considered.
I am going
to end this with a slide I took in 2004, when the North Sound was being raped
by the Bimini Bay developer, to create cheap fill in order to make more
acreage, more real estate to sell at a profit to the company, at the expense of
you the Bahamian Crown land owners.
I took this
aerial shot of the dredging. The
developer claimed that they had, in fact, put in silt curtains to minimize the
siltation created by the dredging process.
Upon closer inspection it was determined that this was an out and out
lie. The yellow line here is an oil
boom. They look good from the
surface. The only problem is that an oil
boom is designed to contain oil that floats on the surface of the water. The oil booms do NOTHING to stop siltation
and sedimentation that is created by the dredging process.
This is what
your reef area will look like in a very few weeks. If I were you, I would be more than upset
over this, I would be LIVID. I will sit
down now as there are further presentations.
Thank you
for your attention.
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