The safety of navigation through Terengganu river mouth breakwater to Manir bridge

Abstract

Terengganu River is one of the most important mode of transportation especially in Kuala Terengganu area. The usage of Terengganu River are mainly for fishing, tourism and also for goods transportation. Due to the increasing of the importance of Terengganu River, the safety of navigation at Terengganu River should be prioritized in order to avoid any damages to people, ship, cargo as well as the environment. But, there is only a few studies that related to the safety of navigation at Terengganu River that leads to the confusion regarding the actual safety status at this river. The sounding of the depth of Terengganu River by using echo sounder and GPS was done in the upperstream area to obtain the data about the depth of the river while the data of the depth of the river was obtained from Jabatan Pengairan dan Saliran (JPS). The data for wave, wind speed and current were obtained from previous researches, and the map of Terengganu River was obtained from Jabatan Ukur dan Pemetaan Malaysia (JUPEM). From the data obtained, it can be said that in term of the depth of the river, Terengganu River is safe for navigation from breakwater up to Manir bridge but there are also some shallow points in the upperstream area. For downstream area, there should be no problem as the river was dredged up to 10 meters during the construction of the breakwater. The construction of breakwater also enables the navigation can be done safely in Terengganu River, even during Monsoon season in term of wave, wind speed and also current. The breakwater acts as a wall to bounce back strong waves to open sea and also as a wind shield from strong wind during monsoon season. As for current, most of the water from the river will be trapped inside the area of breakwater as the breakwater do not allow the water to flow inward and outward of the river mouth. So the current of the water is not that much because of the less movement of water flowing either to the open sea or to the river mouth.