A po­ten­tial so­lu­tion to the ero­sion and sea­son­al flood­ing is­sues ex­pe­ri­enced at Pi­geon Point and Mil­ford Bay in To­ba­go is clos­er in sight.

That as­sur­ance came from the Di­vi­sion of In­fra­struc­ture, Quar­ries and Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment, in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA).

The Di­vi­sion’s Coastal Zone Man­age­ment Unit (CZ­MU) in­di­cat­ed that in ear­ly March 2022, Smith Warn­er In­ter­na­tion­al be­gan work to con­duct a Com­pre­hen­sive Coastal and En­vi­ron­men­tal study as part of a longer-termed ef­fort to mit­i­gate fur­ther dam­age to the coast­line of the tourism and busi­ness hotspots.

A com­plete Eco­log­i­cal As­sess­ment Re­port is due in Au­gust 2022.

As part of the Study, four Acoustic Doppler Cur­rent Pro­fil­ers (AD­CP) were placed at key points on the south-west­ern coast of To­ba­go.

These pro­fil­ers mea­sure coastal con­di­tions in­clu­sive of waves, cur­rents, tides and wa­ter lev­els.

Last week, those four pro­fil­ers were re­trieved from the ocean and the process of down­load­ing and analysing the da­ta has be­gun.

One ad­di­tion­al AD­CP was re-de­ployed on the out­er reef to be able to cap­ture wet and dry sea­son da­ta for the next four months.

Es­sen­tial­ly, the da­ta gath­ered from these pro­fil­ers will then be used to de­sign po­ten­tial na­ture-based so­lu­tions, to mit­i­gate ex­ist­ing con­di­tions and build coastal re­silience against ero­sion and flood­ing in the area.

Project Man­ag­er of Smith Warn­er In­ter­na­tion­al, Ed­ward Al­ba­da, said

“This is all ex­plorato­ry and in­ves­ti­ga­to­ry work with prepa­ra­tion for a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of coastal process­es, which will then feed in­to var­i­ous so­lu­tions that we are look­ing for.”

In Oc­to­ber 2019, sig­nif­i­cant dam­age was done to the coast­line and com­mer­cial struc­tures along the Pi­geon Point Her­itage Park.

The cur­rent stud­ies sup­ple­ment tem­po­rary emer­gency stop-gap mea­sures done by the Di­vi­sion.