Ogle airport proposal before environmental assessment board
Stabroek News
January 6, 2003
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that it has provided its comments on the Environment Impact Assessment for the Ogle Aerodrome expansion project and the matter is currently before the Environmental Assessment Board.
The EIA, which included both the EIA Statement and an Environmental Management Plan, was submitted on July 16.
The Ogle Airport Inc. (OAI) has plans to expand the aerodrome into a municipal airport and a number of studies have been done since 1998 to examine the project’s economic and environmental feasibility. It is expected that the airport will be able to accommodate regional and commercial air traffic on completion. Some US$659,945 has been budgeted by the OAI for the first five years for the monitoring of the environment and repairs to the runway.
The OAI says the proposed expansion will allow for safer operating conditions at night, especially during emergency operations, such as, medivac services or emergency landings.
The developers indicated, too, that just under 300 skilled and unskilled jobs would be created by this venture.
But the proposed development is being opposed by some residents, represented by a group calling itself The Ogle Residents’ Group. It feels that many issues which they had earlier raised had not been sufficiently addressed in the EIA.
These concerns included noise, drainage and treatment of hazardous waste.
Another one of the group’s concerns was that the drainage proposal for the airport ignores the under-capacity of the GUYSUCO drainage system to accommodate the increased run-off water from the larger aerodrome.
This, the group said, could result in the blocking of GUYSUCO’s primary drainage canal.
The EPA also had reservations about certain aspects of the EIA, which was done by Technical Publishing Advisory Services. The agency was of the opinion that construction management had not been significantly addressed and that mitigation measures are mostly for impacts occurring in the operational stage of the completed project.
The EPA felt that the construction stage should have been given more prominence since it will represent the first major stage of the project. The agency was of the opinion, too, that the programme to monitor impacts resulting from the project was incomplete.
It was agreed among the EIA consultants, the developers and the EPA that there will be adjustments to the Environmental Management Plan.
To this end, additional information regarding the adjustments was submitted on October 30.
