I am one of Hong Kong’s oldest dolphin Hunch Back the Wise otherwise known as EL01 by the scientists who say I must be at least 40 years old. This is equivalent to around 80 – 90 years in human age.
The wrinkles on my back can tell you how much I’ve been through. I’ve watched Hong Kong go through a lot. It has changed over the years and I find it difficult to find words to express what I see in front of me now.
When I was young, Hong Kong was just a small city. The dolphins made an earnest and honest living by hunting fish. The human seemed to be much less apathetic and more caring about life. They hadn’t disturbed much if any of the waters and we coexisted in peace together.
As Hong Kong’s economy began to boom after the eighties and nineties, humans started to reclaim open sea for land. Construction sites kept popping up everywhere and taking bits of our home here and there. This includes the Chek Lap Kok Airport reclamation work. We lost over 800 hectares of our home to Hong Kong’s largest reclamation project in history. After that was Tuen Mun, Penny’s Bay, Sunny Bay and Tai O. Nowhere was out of the humans’ reach. We’ve lost parts of our home forever to the sand and rubble that filled the once open waters. It just if we could somehow flood the airport and make it part of the sea again. There would be no going back. There is no going back for us.
The open waters we have left to live in is only decreasing. High speed ferries are increasing and each of them that come and go from Sky Pier make it ever more dangerous for us to live in our own homes. Asides from being a physical danger, the deafening noise of their engines make it impossible for us to communicate or hunt.
Apart from these obvious threats, the water from Peal River is getting more polluted by the minute. Most of these chemicals are colourless and tasteless; its what we can’t see or taste which are the most dangerous. A lot of our young ones cannot withstand the toxic waste and pass away at a young age.
Humans talk about the unchanging 50 years after Hong Kong’s handover from UK to China. It has been 17 years and the oceans have been turned upside down and inside out. We dolphins can’t withstand much more damage to our home. The third runway reclamation project are going to end us once and for all. Do you humans not realise how much damage you have brought to your homes? Just look around; enough harm has been done in the past 17 years. “It fareth between thee and me as it doth between a player at the chess and a looker on, for he that looketh on seeth many draughts that the player considereth nothing at all.” – William Fullonius
Flaws of the Third Runway EIA report (24)
The EIA report mentioned that a qualitative traffic impact assessment was completed to consider the three alternative routes further south of Lantau, and regrettably the report is not available as an appendix in this EIA report so the public cannot assess whether the arguments against such proposals to divert vessel traffic away from the dolphin habitat are feasible or not.
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