In August of this year, Port Nelson reached an agreement with Marine & General Ltd to purchase the assets of Nelson Slipway and the M&G engineering business. Settlement will take place on 30 September.
The drivers for the Port’s purchase are to upgrade the current Nelson Slipway with a modern vessel lifting and maintenance facility, and to operate this facility in conjunction with the existing Calwell Slipway while providing improved environmental protection measures.
The primary funders of the $14.6 million project are Port Nelson and central government, which is contributing $9.8 million through the COVID-19 Response and Recovery Fund. Kānoa - Regional Economic Development & Investment Unit administers the government’s contribution. Supporting funders are Aimex Ltd and Nelson City Council.
Both slipways will be operated by Port Nelson to provide a single efficient marine maintenance facility.
Calwell Slipway will continue to operate throughout the development and the Nelson Slipway will continue in operation until mid-2022. This provides time for the design and consenting process.
The project involves redeveloping and improving services delivered by Port Nelson’s two existing slipping operations, the Calwell Slipway and the Nelson Slipway. Currently Calwell Slipway efficiently slips vessels of 200 tonnes to 2,400 tonnes, while the Nelson Slipway slips vessels less than 120 tonnes.
The new project will create a modern marine maintenance facility that allows more rapid lifting of vessels in the range 50 to 2,400 tonnes. The new development maintains the Calwell Slipway, creates new finger wharves and a hardstand area which will allow a new marine travel lift to operate.
The new facility will include an environment treatment facility for waste from vessel cleaning operations. During construction, contaminated silts will be removed from the harbour basin adjacent to the slipways.
Until construction starts the costs for both Nelson Slipway and Calwell Slipway will stay the same.
Pile driving is part of the redevelopment process. In constructing the facility, we have the requirement to drive 38 1067mm tubular piles and accompanying sheet piling. Noise disturbance can be a result of driving the tubular piles into the ground.
For driving the tubular piles into the ground, we will need to negotiate weather, marine, and in-ground conditions; this means that it is hard to say the exact dates and times of the piling. However, to give you an indication, as part of the approved Resource Consent for the project, we are limited to pile driving between the hours of 0730-1800 Mon-Fri and 0900-1800 on Saturday, as well as set sound Dba limits.
To ensure compliance with sound limits we have several sensors installed at the Port to monitor the sound readings. We also have vibration monitoring equipment on site to ascertain any excessive vibration from pile and sheet driving. At present the data we are receiving shows we are at about 25% of the limit that we and the NCC have set to be excessive.
We would like to apologise if you have been affected by noise during this time period and would like to encourage our community to let us know about any issues via our online complaints form regarding noise here - https://www.portnelson.co.nz/community/living-near-the-port/