by Colin Hyde
Because Waterloo’s foreign consultants were allowed to run on and on unchallenged with their spin, the show descended to the point where the local consultant, Mr. Herrera, said, probably to secure his place on the team, that “God noh like dohti!” I wonder how well he slept that night after he realized the enormity of his charge. As a top thinker, Mr. Herrera should have known that he was insulting the nation’s scientists and environmentalists who sit on the NEAC. Politicians can nudge, but they can’t direct professional scientists on what to do.
That assault from Herrera, really, he must have felt he had to go one better than the foreign consultants, who had a mouthful of not very nice things to say about a lot of our people. The consultants said Belize opted for a far more costly project (Portico (Port Magical) over Waterloo), that Portico wants to set up their port in a pristine part of Belize when their (Waterloo’s) proposed project would be in an area that had been disturbed long ago, for many years…an area that “…all the waste from Belize City passes through there. On top of that, the water in that area is already murky.”
The foreign Waterloo consultants said the basis for the approval of a project should be scientific, not political, should be based on facts, merits, not on influence or reputation. They said the EIA done for the rival project was inferior to the one for theirs. They said they invested a huge amount of capital on their pre-development effort, based on the belief that their project would be reviewed, approved or denied on its merits, and it was just waste… but, but all could be saved if the matter was looked at in the proper light, and appropriate action taken.
Waterloo’s Mr. Herrera said there was no comparison, that it was night and day between the projects. He said that back in the 2000s, development had “started at the Port of Belize even before an EIA was approved”, that they “began dredging and they began development there, in anticipation of an environmental approval later on”, that effectively they (our government) had “already approved the Port of Belize project, including the cruise port, in the early 2000s.”
Waterloo’s consultants erred a few times. Whoa there, about all the waste passing through, Belize City residents for sure don’t want any blockage there, as could happen with the massive dumping of silt in the area. It’s a damned calamity to have a system back up! Someone said the craziest thing they ever heard of was a cargo port doubling as a cruise ship terminal. I don’t know if that was a factor in the NEAC saying nay to the crew at Waterloo.
The Amandala said the foreign consultants addressed a concern that one of the proposals in their 2020 EIA was to widen the One Man Cay Channel that leads to Belize City. The reply was that it had been proven that the largest cruise ships could access Belize City through the channel in its pristine state, so widening of the channel wouldn’t be necessary, and thus there was no request for approval to dredge there.
Being nice, somebody’s being very coy. The skill of the pilots of the more massive cruise ships is put to the test when they have to navigate through One Man Cay Channel. Talk about night and day: as one follows the other, if Waterloo gets clearance to dredge, shortly after it will make a case for, “justify”, widening One Man Cay Channel. We are familiar with the modus operandi of governments when they want their favorite contractors to win the prize.
As per the claim that PBL had a license years ago to do a cruise port, that shouldn’t have been brought up. The facts are that Mr. Luke Espat, who a GoB supported to purchase PBL, would later say that that government reneged on certain agreements, and finally, that the company was stolen from him. Less than a decade after Mr. Espat got control of PBL, it fell into receivership.
We have not yet been told why the government reneged. What we know is that Waterloo did not get any license to construct a cruise port, definitely NOT to dredge 6.5 million cubic meters of silt to make a channel to bring the world’s largest cruise ships to dock near Belize City. It’s really a mighty stretch for Waterloo to suggest that it inherited that right when its principal took control of the company. But if, if the go-ahead that Luke Espat got back in the PUP 1998-2003 government can legitimately be “inherited” by Waterloo, yes, there is the consequential matter of SIZE.
Tanner Callais, in the 2020 story “Chart: See the Dramatic Rise in the Size of Cruise Ships”, which can be found at Cruzely at the website cruzely.com, said that “from 1990 until 2000, most new cruise ships built were in the 70,000-80,000 gross ton range”, and that “from 2015 until today, the average gross tonnage of a new cruise ship from the major cruise lines is 164,000 gross tons…” The need for more massive berthing areas and deeper channels for ships twice the size most likely would not have been envisaged in the original license.
Ships twice the size of the ones a couple decades ago carry twice the number of people, and they pollute twice as much. A 2022 story at Reuters by Caroline Palmer, said the Marine Pollution Bulletin said “a large cruise ship can have a carbon footprint greater than 12,000 cars.” Hannah Towey and Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen, in a story titled “63 cruise ships owned by Carnival Corporation released more toxic sulfur gasses than all the cars in Europe, study says”, which can be found in Insider at the website businessinsider.com, reported that a study by the “European Federation for Transport and Environment found that 63 cruise ships owned by parent company Carnival Corporation emitted 43% more sulfur oxides, a group of harmful air pollutants, than all the 291 million cars in Europe in 2022.”
I think Ms. S. Coye advised that we not ignore the serious health issues associated with smoke pollution. If Waterloo had won the go-ahead from the NEAC, three days each week would be like garbage burning day at the dump outside Belize City, if the wind is blowing from the east or south. And the NEAC would get cuss up night and day for not protecting the Belizean people.
On the description of the Port of Magical Belize site as pristine, by definition a desert could be called that. A desert could also be called uninhabitable. Okay, in a world of 8 billion people a handful might call a desert beautiful. Anyone using the term pristine to describe the Port Magical site should add that in the way of physical beauty, it is not greatly blessed. Of course, that area has natural value, but there is very little going on in the sea in front of it. The swamp in that part of the country, that’s no hatchery for marine creatures anywhere near the likes of what we find on our mangrove islands. If a fisherman put his camp there, he would come under immediate suspicion of being in some ulterior business.
If Waterloo is really eager to get its foot in the cruise tourism game, it should buy shares in Port Magical. The story about town is that the owner of the idea for Port Magical doesn’t have the bank roll to bring it into reality.
Hn, we can expect anything from foreigners, but I think Mr. Herrera owes the NEAC a huge apology. Braa, the PM of Belize said that the NEAC would decide on Waterloo. Bah, this insistence on the PBL site by Waterloo is now bordering on childish (rich peepl children bizniz), an obsession. Or is it complete lack of respect for the Belizean people?