27 November, 2016
Officials of the Megapolis Ministry, Port City and the project contractor China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) have begun inspections of the quarries that supply quarry material for the Port City project.
According to the SEIA approval, material could be sourced only from licensed quarries and the inspection tours are to ensure that all the conditions stipulated in the environment approvals are properly met.
The first of the visits made by the team of officials was led by Deputy Director General of the UDA and Director of the Port City Development Project, Nihal Fernando on November 16.
The team included representatives of the Ministry of Megapolis, UDA, CHEC Port City Colombo (Pvt) Limited (the project company) and CHEC. The visit was made to licensed quarries in Meegoda and Korathota.
Of the 250 quarries in the districts of Colombo, Gampaha and Kalutara, only 11 quarries will be used for the supply of quarry material for the Port City Project. According to the report, when considering the total existing licensed quarries in the three districts the volume of rock to be obtained from the identified quarries, works out to only 7.0 percent and 2.3 percent of the capacity of quarries in Colombo and Gampaha respectively, and zero percent from Kalutara, as the project does not expect to source quarry material from this district.
Therefore, the project will only use 4.4 percent of all existing quarries in these districts.