SINGAPORE BASE

New Zealand Times, Volume LIV, Issue 12648, 7 January 1927, Page 11

SINGAPORE BASE

DESCRIPTION OF THE SITE BIG CONTRACT LET. Almost coincident with the announcement that the big floating dock for the Singapore naval base • is to be built by Messrs Swan and Hunter at WalLsend-on-Tyne, England, the work of preparing the mooring for the dock has begun (writes a correspondent in the “Sydney Morning Herald”). This is a big step in the construction of the base, which now is little more than swamp and jungle. Seletar, the site of the base, is on the north side of Singapore Island, which is separated from the mainland of the Malay Peninsula by the Strait of Johore at Seletar, about a mile wide. The base is about twelve miles from the sea, and three or four from the Johore causeway carrying the road and railway for the island to Penang. Singapore town, on the south of the island, is fifteen miles away by road. Between the site for the naval base proper and the main’line railway —yet unconnected with the base—is the oil storage depot of nearly forty, tanks, practically complete, at a cost of £OBO.OOO. A mile or two seawards from the hose will be the air station, and behind the site for this, on a hill a little way inland, is a naval wireless station. . Although the base was first mooted three years ago, much of the site is a jungle of rubber owing to the various decisions of the British Government not to proceed with the base, and then to go on with it. Unfortunately, while all the talk has been going on some very fine and mature rubber areas have been going to waste, and aft enormous amount of rubber has been left untapped. At present the naval base consists of a row of workshops fairly well equipped for small engineering work, a light railway about half a mile long, a sandbank to keep the sea from reclaimed swamp land, and a rough pile jetty. From the jetty are operating a dredge and hoppers preparing the mooring for the floating dock. The dock will have a capacity to take vessels of 50,000 to 55,000 tons, and up to 36ft draught, and it will need to have a mooring at least 70ft deep. To enable this depth to be made to the flat centre an area of seabed 120 yards long and 320 yards broad has to be dredged, and, in addition, an approach from the centre of the strait nearly 40ft deep. This work will occupy eighteen months or two venrs—about the same i>eriod the building of the clack is exnectcd to take. The dredge has eighty-two buckets of two and a half tons capa-

city each, and is attended by six'hoppers capable of carrying 700 tons of sludge to sea for dumping. The contract price for the floating dock is £1,200,000, and it will take six months to' tow from England to Singapore via the Cape of Good Hope. Should the proposed graving dock he built it will cost at least £11,000,000 with defences, • workshops, accommodation, etc., but up to last March only £IBO,OOO had been spent on this part of the base. The Federated. Malay States gave the site of the base to the British Government—a present of £146,000 — and also £2,000,000 in cash, and Hongkong, • which tendered for the building of the floating dock, has given £250,000. At the Imperial Conference the dominions’ representatives were asked what their countries might be able to do, but no other decisions have been reached.