Council engineer says incinerator won't affect traffic

INDAVER’S plan for a €160m municipal and hazardous waste incinerator in the Cork Harbour area will not add significantly to traffic congestion, a planning hearing into the project has heard.

Cork County Council’s senior executive engineer (traffic) Peter O’Donoghue said that the road network serving the site has sufficient capacity during off-peak hours to be able to deal with the traffic flows generated.

Mr O’Donoghue said the road network serving the site has a capacity to cater for 2,600 vehicles per hour. Off-peak, it has a spare capacity of 800-1,000 vehicles, and Indaver was projecting 160 truck journeys per day – an extra 11 vehicles per hour. Traffic consultant for Indaver, Niall Harte of Arup, had earlier confirmed that Indaver has already committed to a 14-hour opening period for waste acceptance, 6am-8pm, to mitigate trafffic impact.

Tom Leonard, a hazard-identification expert with consultants for Indaver, played down suggestions that the proposed incinerator was at risk of explosion as happened at Indaver’s incinerator at Stabroek near Antwerp on February 26th.

Derry Chambers of the Cork Environmental Alliance questioned what would happen if a fire occurred outside the bunker area. Indaver planned to have a fire-water retention tank with a 2,200-cubic metre capacity, sufficient to retain water used to fight a two-hour fire, but he asked if this was enough. 

In 1993, a fire at Hicksons chemical plant in Ringaskiddy lasted for six hours and firefighters used 6,819 cubic metres to bring it under control. Hicksons did not have the capacity to store all the water used, so contaminated water was pumped into the harbour.