The Tribune

WORKS and Urban Development Minister Philip “Brave” Davis urged engineers to rediscover the value of traditional engineering techniques and apply them in a modern context.

Speaking at the Society of Engineers Banquet, Mr Davis warned of the urgent need for sustainability in the face of global challenges brought on by development.

“We may well have created a technologically sophisticated human world, but I’m afraid the evidence speaks for itself. We have, by default, engineered something of a looming disaster and we need all the ingenuity we can muster to pull back from it.

“The process involved in developing all of our sophisticated technology has, it seems, persuaded us to think we are somehow a disconnected part of nature when, in fact, if you think about it, we are nature,” he said.

Mr Davis said he is encouraged that there is now a move toward the use of sustainable drainage systems.

He cited the drainage for the new Airport Gateway Project, which makes extensive use of a wetland swale system and where necessary, is connected to deep drainage wells which enhance the capacity of the ground to absorb rainwater.

“These features are not just practical, but attractive too,” Mr Davis said. “Such features of the landscape also happen to enhance the experience of living with water features and the associated habitat, flora and fauna a far more invigorating environment than hard concrete.”

Mr Davis emphasised that support for the restoration of wetlands, and natural storage and drainage systems, has to be a much more “significant” movement.

Building designs should routinely incorporate rainwater harvesting and storage tanks, thereby saving the need to pipe large quantities of water, as each building could collect the excess run-off it generates and store it for use as flushing water, as still occurs in the Family Islands, he said.

Additionally, consideration should be given to a minimum height for building floor levels and the use of stilts for foundations as opposed to the traditional use of fill.

“We now live on a capital island where almost all of the hills have been cut away to harvest fill for foundations. This would be especially beneficial on low lying shore communities in order to give future storm surges space to move without taking the buildings along with the flow,” he said.

“If we take the trouble to rediscover time-honoured, traditional approaches and consult local people at the grass roots, we can develop the sorts of solutions for our projects that could make them truly sustainable in the roundest sense, and which recognise local knowledge and local conditions which may be far from apparent to a designer who only has limited time to understand the environment he is designing for.

“Buildings are still too often constructed out of materials that are deeply environmentally unfriendly. Glass, steel, concrete surely all fall into that category – because of the embodied energy (and carbon) in their production – especially if they are incorporated into designs that are very much ‘in the moment’. And so, within 30 or 40 years, they are ripe for demolition and replacement,” he said.