While we’d heard rumours from industry sources that the Palm Jumeirah might be sinking into the seabed, FT Alphaville never had any evidence to support them.
Nor could we corroborate rumours that questionable building standards in Dubai had led to cracks and window damage in many of the emirate’s new property developments.
All in all, the rumours struck us too convenient a scare story given recent news flow from the kingdom.
On Wednesday, however, it seemed Nakheel — the Dubai World subsidiary and indebted property developer of such offshore wonders as the Palm and the Burj al-Arab in Dubai — had finally had enough with conjecture of this sort.
A company executive told the UAE’s National (our emphasis):
The Palm Jumeirah is not sinking into the sea, contrary to speculation in recent days, a Nakheel executive says. “The proof is in the pudding,” said Shaun Lenehan, the head of Nakheel’s environment department. “The Palm is intact. If there were subsidence, you would see cracks in the buildings, windows popping out. We have no evidence of that happening.”
But the US$12 billion (Dh44.07) island has settled slightly since it was created, in line with all artificially created land masses, Mr Lenehan and other engineers said. He was responding to claims from a landscape surveyor speaking at a conference in Qatar, who was quoted as saying that the Palm Jumeirah was sinking by an average of 5mm a year and might flood in the future if ocean levels rose.
The engineer cited satellite images of the island taken periodically over the past few years. Fugro NPA, the satellite mapping company where the surveyor works, yesterday said its findings were taken out of context and that the island was going through a natural process. “Settlement is a normal occurrence following construction,” the company said.
“No conclusion can be drawn about the long term. “The point displacements measured at Palm Island in the first few years following construction [less than 1cm per year] are well within the expected natural settlement range for such a large structure and such settlement would be factored into the engineering design of the island.”So there you have it: the island is sinking, but only in line with expectations.
And if you want to know why that is so:
Mr Lenehan, of Nakheel, said the actual settlement on Palm Jumeirah would be a maximum of 25mm over the course of 100 years. The key to preventing an island from sinking further into the sea is in the geo-engineering used to build it, he said. After laying down layers of rocks and sand, construction companies use a process called “vibrocompacting”, where a device vibrates the sand until it settles into a more solid state.
Related links:
Tuesday Dubai doom and gloom – FT Alphaville
Dubai World restructuring to take months – FT