Dredging Boats, Yachts and Land Reclamation Projects
How to find and investigate details on boats, events and projects in Malaysian waters and coastal regions
A lot happens at sea and near Malaysian shores.
Google Search
A trick for Google searches is to use combined filetype and site qualifiers.
site:*.gov.my limits search results only to Malaysian government department websites ending with .gov.my.
filtype:pdf limits limits results to pdf files only
The following will search for PDF documents related to reclamation projects in all government websites crawled by Google.
Penambakan Tanah filetype:pdf site:*.gov.myOther useful types:
- documents: pdf,doc,docx,odt
- presentations: ppt,pptx,odp
- spreadsheets: csv,ods,xls,xlsx
Tip: Malaysian public servants love ultra dense text filled presentations. Always include ppt and pptx searches, which will often return project details on internal and community briefings.
Tip: Use multiple terms, English and Malay including possible misspelled keywords. When you find a lead document, check what other terms are used and search for those as well. There is also inconsistency for some government terms because often the source documents are written by external consultants.
Malaysian Government Documents
Environmental Impact Assessment Reports
Executive summaries of EIA documents preliminary and detailed are available online at the Department of Environment website.
These public documents provide detailed information on companies involved with the projects, along with locations, maps and details such as amount of sand or land acquisition. These can be correlated with other information such as price of sand to estimate total values of such contracts, along with the environmental cost.
The interface isn’t very helpful for full text searches, we can reapply the Google search on the subsite url instead:
penambakan site:ekas.doe.gov.myIn this example document we find interesting details for Jimah East Power station, an asset related EDRA and 1MDB, the involvement of a state government company and the contractors that will profit from sand mining from a related reclamation project.
Maritime Department Malaysia Port Circulars
Another source of information for coastal projects are the port circulars for ship navigators. These documents also provide information on companies, and project geolocation including warning buoys. Additionally it will also include information on the companies and names of the boats authorized to work in designated areas.
A Google site and type search can be used to find the circulars you are looking for:
penambakan site:www.marine.gov.my type:pdf
One can find position of Latitude and Longtitude (Latlong) by entering it into a Google Maps search eg. 2° 32’ 06”,101° 44’ 17”
Or for a set of points, to enter it in a spreadsheet and import it into Google Fusion Tables to generate a map such as one shown below:
Marine Traffic Location and Tracking
Like airlines, ships are also tracked by traffic controllers called vessel tracking services (VTS). Internationally, large ships (300 tons) and all passenger ships also have automatic identification system (AIS) which automatically reports locations to respective VTS.
For Peninsular Malaysia, Malacca and Singapore Straits, the vessel categories required to report location is longer:
- vessels of 300 GT and above;
- vessels of 50 metres or more in lenght;
- vessels engaged in towing or pushing with a combined GT of 300 and above, or with a combined lenght of 50 metres or more;
- vessels of any tonnage carrying hazardous cargo, as defined in paragraph 1.4 of resolution MSC.43(64).
- all passanger vessels that are fitted with VHF, regardless of lenght or GT
- any category of vessels less than 50 metres in lenght or less than 300 GT which are fitted with VHF and in an emergency, uses the appropriate traffic lane or separation
MarineTraffic.com is a public website that tracks public data from these VTS and AIS to plot and track location and details of ships in almost real time. One can also search for boats currently in the area and information on that.
Of course there is likelihood that illegal vessels may not turn on their transponders or report their location, but for large enough vessels such as sand barges this would be problem for the local VTS and port authorities in doing their jobs. They would be additional authorities to contact for verification.
Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) also maintains a large list of additional resources for tracking ships.
