A little bit of Ireland will end up on the Continent as the Dublin Gas Company site reclamation off Sir John Rogerson's Quay gets underway. Up to half of the soil on the 22-acre site will have to be shipped to Holland for thermal decontamination and will eventually be used there for road construction.
There are no treatment facilities for such an undertaking here, hence the need to ship the soil away. It will contain a range of highly toxic and noxious chemicals, left behind by 200 years of gas production on the site.
A purpose-built enclosed high-rise conveyor will be installed to carry the soil off site and deposit it directly into ships berthed at the quayside on the Liffey. It is expected that this will allow the soil to be moved without churning up dust beyond the strict limits that have been set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Smells from this type of reclamation can also become an issue, as happened at the Bord Gais site on Albert Road in Cork. The contractors can adopt a range of approaches to this type of pollution escape including using misters which spray out fine droplets of water that capture the volatile chemicals responsible for the odours and wash them out of the air.
The Dublin Docklands Development Authority expects that 60 per cent of the site will be given over to residential use. In this context the developers will have to work hard to convince would-be buyers that there will be no future threat of chemical residues in the subsoils.
This makes the role of the Environmental Protection Agency a crucial part of the project. It also means that the first steps towards remediation of the site must be carried out under strict control so there will be no surprises 10 or 20 years down the road.
