At last! A window in the awful weather allowed the contractors to tug the first half of our unloading facility pontoon into place this morning. It was a bit of a foggy, 'soft' morning fo photos but it was great to see the dark shape coming up the River Crouch out of the mists.
Two 76 metre long pontoons will join to create a single jetty, at which ships will unload the essential ingredient for our new nature reserve. Each ship will carry up to 2.5 thousand tons of excavated earth from the Crossrail tunnels being dug, deep down under central London. Once firmly in place, this jetty will accommodate two ships at a time. The equipment on the jetty will include four unloading machines, two on each pontoon, with conveyors feeding hoppers which in turn feed an 800 metre central conveyor that carries the material across the marsh to shore. On the island side of the seawalls, a radial stacker arm will stockpile the clean excavated material in a carefully prepared part of the site before it is placed in carefully planned areas to recreate the new mudflat and saltmarsh levels.
So as you can guess, its quite a sight down there at the moment! Unfortunately the huge amount of rain has made the site pretty sticky, but the seawall is free draining so walkers may walk along to, and beyond, the crossing point on the seawall. From there you may look seaward viewing the long conveyor belt running down the berm and across the marsh to the pontoon , or landward where the conveyor continues down to the radial stacker. Of course, there is still a good mile or so to walk beyond that to get to the far end of the public footpath, which remains open throughout. For the armchair viewers, there is always the view from the webcam though. (http://www.carnyx.tv/CarnyxWild/WallaseaIsland.aspx.)
Hopefully, the sun is not too far away and it will soon entice visitors to go and see for themselves. Our Flickr site has photos from this morning and will be updated once the second half of the pontoon is also in place. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rspb_wallasea_island_wild_coast_project/sets/)
I've gone wild on Wallasea!