Letters / Whalsay community will be watching
It was reported last week that the SIC are to conduct a new transport consultation, this will be the third one this century; so the question I have to ask is, will the result produced by SIC officialdom from this new consultation on transport links; be any more credible than those they produced during the previous two decades?
‘Intense’ piece of work ongoing to explore fixed link requirements
After the first decade of consultation this century, the construction costs for new ferries and terminals options for the Whalsay route; were backdated to 2002 prices, before being compared by SIC officials; to a 2010 price for a fixed link to Whalsay.
During the second decades consultation, the Shetland Inter Islands Transport Study (SIITS) included a statement that claimed “it was cheaper to run ferries on the Whalsay five to seven mile open sea route for 60 year (£203.4 million) than it was to run a tunnel over a period of 60 years, for nearly a third of the cost at (£69.5 million),with the tunnel running cost quoted from Norway was less than half this figure in 2016/17.
The 2015/16 Whalsay ferry costs were £3.4 million per annum, in comparison to a £1.2 million per annum tunnel running cost, both of those figures were sourced from the same SIITS report and adapted for the Whalsay tunnel length mentioned in SIITS.
Those are just some of the anomalies we found in those reports, there were many more that I could have mentioned.
During those 60 years from now, under the prescribed life term regulations for the ferries infrastructure five new ferries and six new ferry terminals would be required due to the requirement for three terminals to be built to serve the open seas Whalsay routes, which are roughly double the length of the Yell Sound route.
During the past two decades a poll of the Whalsay community confirmed that a tunnel was the preferred option for a new Whalsay transport link.
From 2010, members of the Whalsay community have sourced three tunnel offers; plus funding, including “a quote of £76 million” for the construction of a tunnel as our proposed new transport link in 2016/17; all of those offers were dismissed by the SIC.
The tunnel quote from an established Norwegian tunnelling contractor with many years of tunnelling experience, was the only valid tunnel figure in the whole SIITS report, all of the other transport link figures were from desktop exercises.
It will be interesting to see what negative reasons SIC officialdom will produce this time, to enable them to continue to dismiss the quote for the construction of a Whalsay tunnel during this third decade of transport link consultations; but one thing is certain, our community will be watching and ready to continue to highlight whatever irregularities we find in the SIC official’s calculations.
William Polson
Whalsay
