QUAY WALLS in Cork city which were damaged in last year’s heavy flooding will be repaired either late this year or early in 2011, a senior engineer with Cork City Council has confirmed.
Senior executive engineer of the Road and Transportation Directorate Ian Winning said it is expected that tender documents for the repair of quay walls at Grenville Place and Sunday’s Well will issue at the end of the month.
It will take five to six weeks to assess and decide on a successful tender but construction work on the damaged section of quay walls will commence either late this year or early next year with work expected to last 30 weeks.
According to Mr Winning, consultants were hired by Cork City Council to prepare detailed specifications on what exactly is required to ensure there is no repeat of what happened in the November 2009 floods when sections of the quay walls collapsed. The OPW, which has authority for sanctioning the work, allocated some €900,000 last June from its minor flood relief scheme for the repair of the damaged quay walls but Mr Winning said that Cork City Council had added to this to allow additional work be done.
This additional work would see the repair of the quay walls at nine additional locations other than at Grenville Place where some 20m of wall collapsed and at Sunday’s Well where a large section of wall collapsed.
These additional locations would include cases where individual blocks may have fallen from low down on the quay walls below the high-tide level, leading to concern about the structural integrity of the walls even though there may not have been any breach.
Mr Winning said that the limestone blocks which fell into the north channel of the Lee at Grenville Place were buried under rock armour which the council was forced to put in place to protect the integrity of the road and the safety of buildings in the area.