Saintly sailors

THANK you, Herald, for reporting last week Fremantle Ports is planning maintenance dredging of the Inner Harbour next year. 

Subject to approvals, that dredging would remove accumulated sediment that’s come down the river and settled in the harbour since capital dredging occurred in 2010. 

We’re not making it deeper, just ensuring large ships can continue to arrive and leave safely. 

The process would take just 10 days, and is planned for April. 

The Herald suggested (tongue firmly in cheek?) the dredging might also remove ‘whatever gets thrown over the side of freighters’, but we can happily report those days are over. 

Any discharge of waste from a ship has been banned under the Port Authority Regulations for decades, and big fines exist if needed. 

We promise to keep the local community informed about the maintenance dredging as it draws closer.

Neil Stanbury
Fremantle Ports

Thank goodness they listened

IT’S really good that Main Roads and the state government have listened to the views that the community has consistently expressed with regard to Fremantle’s new traffic bridge.

There will, no doubt, still be matters of detail to be addressed, and I hope that Lisa O’Malley’s comment encouraging “the community to have their say on the new design during the development approval process” come to pass and are responded to constructively by the Fremantle (and East Fremantle) communities.

I guess the main disappointments are:

(a) that it has taken more than three years to arrive at a proposal that the people of Fremantle pretty much put on the table at the beginning, and

(b) that it does not include even partial retention of the existing traffic bridge.

With regard to the latter, therefore, we would like to see Main Roads (and City of Fremantle?) commission a scale model of the existing traffic bridge as a counterpart to the model of the 1933 model of the 1866 Bridge of Sticks that is currently in the WA Maritime Museum. 

I understand that Main Roads has undertaken a detailed 3-D scan of the existing bridge which should provide sufficient information for such a model, including possibly 3-D printing.

As convenor of the Bridge Integrity Group, I would like to thank Main Roads and Fremantle Bridge Alliance staff for their unfailing courtesy in sometimes-difficult circumstances that often precluded their sharing information and reassurances the community was desperately seeking.

Ian Ker
South Fremantle

A nod to independence

NOW that the state Labor government’s Swan River Crossings project has been revised; such that their ludicrous idea that “Canning Highway will be re-located to the foreshore” has been cancelled, will the Mayor of Fremantle be apologising to the people of Fremantle, for the unedifying spectacle of her nodding in agreement with her Labor friends at the media conference to announce this project in 2022; when her constituency, the people of Fremantle, hadn’t been consulted and when they forced their way into the conversation, totally disagreed with her, Rita Saffoti, Simone McGurk and Josh Wilson in relation to this proposed desecration of our natural environment.

I don’t have a bone to pick with her personally; my point is, surely the office of the mayor of Fremantle has to be, and be seen to be, independent of federal and state politics – otherwise we don’t need three levels of government.

Damon Hurst
Fremantle

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