This article is from page 8 of the 2014-01-07 edition of The Clare People. OCR mistakes are to be expected so download the original SWF or the rendered page 8 JPG
BUSINESS people in Doolin are keen to ensure that damage inflicted on Doolin Pier over the weekend is addressed as soon as possibly. The pier, its access road and the car park took extensive damage on Thursday night, with much of the flood defenses also being destroyed.
This left the pier vulnerable to a second wave of flooding on Monday morning, which undid much of the repair work undertaken by locals and Clare County Council over the weekend.
Eugene Garrihy of the Doolin2Aran ferry company is keen to ensure that the damage to Doolin not be left on the long finger while repairs are carried out elsewhere.
“Lahinch is getting a lot of the attention and rightly so; there was incredible damage done there, but the situation in Doolin needs to be address also. It is a terminal port and many of the tourists there are international tourists,” he said.
“We need the ESB to bring electricity back to the area and we need the council to restore some sort of road service so we can access the pier and start to get things back to normal.”
The Doolin Pier was hit with a double whammy with the smaller Monday morning storm doing more damage that the Friday storm, because all the flood defenses had been washed away on Friday.
“The fact that a lot of defenses were broken down on Friday meant that this morning surge [Monday] did an awful lot of damage even though it wasn’t as big. A lot of boulders and debris at the ferry offices on the pier were moved again last night, but at least we had a bit more warning about it,” continued Eugene.
“The basic infrastructure of the pier – the road and walls – have all been disturbed so that will have to be reinstated as soon as possible. It was the water rather than the wind that did the damage in Doolin.
“We took it upon ourselves to get the clean-up started on Saturday. We had five or six men there with a machine and we got a lot of the infrastructure back in action. The council also sent up a JCB and started to clear the car park. Hopefully we have seen the worst of it and we can get back to the clean up work tomorrow [Tuesday, January 7].”