Ennore Port, 16 Km North of Chennai Port, Another Erosion Problem Was Emerged and Similar Issues Like Chennai Port Are on the Way
i EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The coastline of Chennai with a hinterland of 20km offer a variety of environmental issues and problems, which need integrated management. These include the coastal erosion and accretion, pollution from human settlement and industries, loss of aesthetics in tourism beaches and declining fishery resources. The ICMAM Project Directorate undertook the task of analysing above problems and prepared integrated management solutions, which will help to solve these problems and also avoidance of occurrence of such problems in future. It is well known that the shoreline along Chennai coast is subjected to oscillations due to natural and man made activities. After construction of Chennai port, coast north of port is eroded and 350 hectares land is lost into sea. The river Cooum that carries domestic sewage is closed due to accretion of sand south port. State Government resorted to short term measures for protecting coastal stretch of length 6 km at Royapuram with sea wall and the erosion problem shifted to further north. Now with the construction of Ennore port, 16 km North of Chennai port, another erosion problem was emerged and similar issues like Chennai port are on the way. If, no intervention is planned, threat to ecologically sensitive Pulicat Lake is inevitable. North Ennore Coast is already experiencing increased wave action and the naturally formed protection barriers, the “Ennore Shoals”, may likely to be disturbed by construction of Port. Baseline data reveal that the Ennore creek on south of Ennore port is experiencing increased siltation. Since the available information on Ennore coast is not sufficient for working out suitable measures, a research project entitled “Shoreline management along Ennore” has been formulated to conduct detailed field and model investigations on various dynamical aspects (water level variations, currents & circulation, tides, waves, bathymetric variations, sediment transport, shoreline changes etc) of Ennore coast covering Ennore creek to Pulicat mouth.
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