A sponsorship signing ceremony between SC Tubular Solutions (B) Sdn Bhd (SCTSB) and Poni Divers for Brunei Reef Ball Programme was held at the Royal Brunei Yacht Club in Serasa yesterday.
Witnessing the signing were Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Primary Resources and Tourism Hajah Tutiaty binti Haji Abdul Wahab and French Ambassador to Brunei Darussalam Bernard Regnauld-Fabre.
Signing on behalf of Poni Divers was its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mohd Tahsin Wong Abdullah and for SCTSB, it was its General Manager Phil Grant.
With the signing, SCTSB is set to be the first sponsor for the Brunei Reef Ball Programme, sponsoring BND39,995 to launch the SCTSB Reef Ball School Programme to teach 42 SCTSB staff and 126 local school children how to fabricate reef balls, learn to plant coral onto them, and deploy them to the open sea at Pelong Rock with Fisheries Department support.
The Pony Divers CEO shared reef balls are specially engineered concrete balls built without any metal rebars, with special additives to make it coral friendly that can last up to 500 years in the sea.
They are also designed to be homes for fish and help rehabilitate fisheries stock and rebuild coral reefs.
Larger reef balls of up to five tonnes in size can be built and deployed to build artificial reefs, protecting the beaches from coastal erosion and deterring illegal foreign trawlers at sea.
It was also shared that as part of the programme, 120 reef balls will be deployed, each weighing about 20 kilogrammes, with six corals to be planted per reef ball, over the next six months.
The programme also includes the deployment of several underwater data loggers to monitor the water environment at the site, including salinity, dissolved oxygen, temperature and other variables on a daily basis that will be uploaded online to be shared with the Fisheries Department and other local educational institutes for research. – Adib Noor
