Ba River maintenance dredging underway

The Fiji Government recently started a maintenance dredging project in the Ba River that will safeguard the township of Ba and the neighbouring communities from flooding.

According to the Government, the dredging works will mitigate flooding with an increased amount of water discharge capacity that would benefit the business sectors in the town.

During the works, a total of 19 kilometres of river dredging works will be undertaken by the Ministry of Waterways, under the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) agreement with Vanua Ko Ba Holdings.

While commissioning the river dredging works in Ba last week, Minister for Waterways, Environment and Agriculture, Dr Mahendra Reddy, reiterated that due to the constant flooding, the water discharge capacity has been diminished and this has caused flooding in the Ba town and adjacent communities.

“The current discharge capacity of Ba River now is around 1570 cubic meters per second which have been reduced to almost half due to the silt material in the Ba River,” said Dr Reddy.

Dr Reddy also added that upon the completion of the 19 kilometres of dredging works, around 3.8 million cubic meters of silt would be removed which will increase the water discharge capacity to around 2,180 cubic meters per second.