Groundbreaking ceremony held for Canal Istanbul amid controversy
A groundbreaking ceremony for the Canal Istanbul’s first bridge has taken place, amid controversy about the ambitious and risky nature of the project.
The mega-project, meant to prevent risks posed by vessels carrying dangerous shipments through the Bosphorus Strait, will connect the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea.
“Canal Istanbul is an essential project to protect the historical and cultural fabric of the Bosphorus strait,” said president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “We consider Canal Istanbul a project to save the future of Istanbul.”
Stressing that the number of ships going through the Strait of Istanbul annually has jumped from 3,000 in the 1930s to 45,000 today, Erdogan said projections foresee up to 78,000 ships possibly making the journey by 2050, with each large ship posing a serious risk to Istanbul.
According to the Guardian, the official price tag is $15bn, but the real figure was estimated at a recent developers conference in France to be $65bn. In an extremely polarised society like Turkey, building a canal linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara is a rare topic on which almost everyone agrees: it’s a crazy idea.
“The canal would create enormous and irreversible adverse impacts on the ecosystem and society in not only Istanbul, but the entire Marmara region,” Dr Akgün İlhan, a water management expert at the Istanbul Policy Centre, told the Guardian. “There is both freshwater loss of up to 13% of the water currently available for human use, and the even greater danger of soil and groundwater salinisation and contamination as the canal would carry salty water from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara.
“The canal will also make Istanbul more vulnerable to earthquakes and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. A project on such a large scale that connects two different seas can never be considered safe.”
The canal – to be built on the Turkish metropolis’ European side – will be around 45 kilometres (28 miles) long, 275 metres (902 feet) wide, and 20.75 metres (68 feet) deep, according to TRTWorld.
It is expected to be completed in six years, with around one-and-half-years preparatory work and five-and-half years of construction. Six bridges will be built over the canal, transforming Istanbul into a city with two seas.
Cities boasting some 250,000 residences are planned to be built on both sides of the canal.
“One of the most important pillars of Turkey’s growth vision in the last 19 years is the claim we have made in terms of our transportation, communication and logistics infrastructure,” says minister of transport and infrastructure Adil Karaismailoğlu.
“As a country that dominates the most important trade corridors of the developing world, Turkey will become the world’s most important logistics centre with the Canal Istanbul. Thus, the Black Sea will turn into a trade lake for Turkey.”
Karaismailoğlu says the canal will fulfil an important task in highlighting the Istanbul Valley, which is at the crossroads of the world, and in establishing a logistics base, technology development and living centre in Turkey by creating a sustainable new generation city.
