Mavi Boncuk |
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Monday that finishing the artificial sea-level waterway Kanal Istanbul project will reveal the burden of the 1936 Montreux Convention, which allows foreign merchant vessels to pass through the Turkish straits with a minimum fee.
Report PDF PDF2
Kanal Istanbul | Environmental Evaluation report (ÇED Report in Turkish) http://eced.csb.gov.tr/ced/jsp/ek1/21257#
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President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Monday that finishing the artificial sea-level waterway Kanal Istanbul project will reveal the burden of the 1936 Montreux Convention, which allows foreign merchant vessels to pass through the Turkish straits with a minimum fee.
The planned Kanal Istanbul megaproject got the environmental green light Monday. The Environment and Urbanization Ministry gave the approval in a report submitted over a year after environmental impact assessments and survey work were finished in August 2018.
The report will be presented for public comment for 10 days at the ministry and the Istanbul Provincial Environment and Urbanization Directorate.
Kanal Istanbul is one of Turkey's most strategic megaprojects, meant to stem the rising risk posed by ships carrying dangerous goods via the Bosporus.
The 45-kilometer canal, which will be built in Istanbul's Küçükçekmece-Sazlıdere-Durusu corridor, will boast a capacity of 160 vessels a day. The tender for the project was previously planned for next year.
The massive infrastructure development project, originally announced by Erdoğan in 2011, aims to reduce pressure on the Bosporus – one of the world's busiest maritime passages – and play a significant role in preventing vessel accidents and minimizing risks and dangers, particularly those associated with tankers. The canal will link the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, north and south of Istanbul, becoming an alternative for the global shipping lane.
The president said that the project's aim is to increase the security of the Bosporus and mentioned the MT Independenta incident as one of the consequences of Turkey's inability to regulate the strait's shipping traffic. In 1979, the MT Independenta, a large Romanian crude oil carrier, collided with a Greek freighter at the southern entrance of the Bosporus and exploded. Almost all of the tanker's crew members died. The wreck of the Independenta burned for weeks, causing heavy air and sea pollution in the Istanbul area and the Marmara Sea.
Between 1953-2003, 461 accidents occurred on the Bosporus.
The last major accident in the strait was in 2003 when a Georgian-flagged vessel ran aground, resulting in a spill of 480 tons of oil.
Report PDF PDF2
Kanal Istanbul | Environmental Evaluation report (ÇED Report in Turkish) http://eced.csb.gov.tr/ced/jsp/ek1/21257#
