Green Hands On Deck At RWS

Green Hands On Deck At RWS
Thu, Aug 09, 2007AsiaOne

With a three-year completion deadline, it is literally all hands on deck at the site of the upcoming Resorts World at Sentosa (RWS).

Construction workers from three different contractors are operating on a three-shift, 24-hour, seven days a week schedule on the sprawling 49 ha site. This includes road diversion works, land reclamation and the building of a substructure basement that will hold 4,000 parking lots.

It was barely eight months ago when RWS won the award to build Singapore's second Integrated Resort (IR), and since then it has handed out over $430 million in construction contracts, with the next batch for the building above ground to be given out in the last quarter of this year.

The current team of some RWS staff in the corporate and projects sections has also moved into a 6,000 sq metres office building which rose from ground zero in a mere four months.

The facade of the five-storey block, consisting of two wings, is in the iconic style of RWS' architect Michael Grave, and houses a landscape courtyard, gym, and an employee lounge.

Despite the frenzied speed of development, RWS is taking a "green-handed" approach in conserving the surrounding environment of the $5.2 billion resort.

The northern shore of Sentosa, where RWS will be built on, is home to some 3,000 trees and a coral fringe - which the IR developer is taking great efforts to preserve or relocate.

RWS has already relocated 200 pieces of coral which would otherwise have been eradicated by land reclamation. About 12 per cent of the kilometre-long shoreline has a coral fringe - home to some 20 varieties measuring 30 to 50cm across.

During a three-week project undertaken by marine biologists from consultancy firm DHI Water & Environment, a representative sample of the coral population was displaced to the Southern Islands, in a bid to regenerate a complete ecosystem.

Ms Sonya Pans, Head of environmental management services at DHI, said that the hard corals were more likely to be chosen as they took twice as long to grow compared to the soft varieties. DHI will continue to monitor the corals over a year in its new home, whose location will be kept secret to prevent poaching.

Above ground, RWS has started relocating about 200 of the site's 3,000 trees to a temporary nursery, which will subsequently be replanted in about three years time.

Another 700 trees, including those in a 2.9 ha coastal forest located on the western edge of the construction site, will also be left untouched. Earlier this year, nature enthusiasts had appealed to developers to leave intact this coastal forest, which is home to a large number of rare Dragon Blood trees, and a roosting site for the Buffy Fish Owl.

About 300 trees that could not be saved are to be recycled for timber, and will return to the resort as furniture, souvenirs and construction structures.

RWS' conservation efforts will not come cheap - each tree costs about $2,000 to keep in the temporary nursery on Sentosa. A new tree would only cost a third of that price. However, as these transplated trees are fully-grown, they will provide ample shade for visitors the day RWS opens, compared to the cheaper alternative of younger saplings.

In keeping a balance between development and conservation, Mr Michael Chin, Director for Projects at RWS, said in an interview with the Singapore Tourism Board: "Taking on the green mantle is like steering a bullet train and trying to grow shrubs along the way.

"Conservation has to be a decision taken early, in the planning stages, not after the concrete has set," he added.