Flood damage in Cork is to be repaired soon, a senior engineer with Cork City Council has confirmed.

He said that two major flood breaches in the city's quay walls would begin before the end of the year, or early in 2011 at the latest.

Tenders for the work to repair the walls at Sunday's Well and at Grenville Place near the Mercy University Hospital will be invited shortly.

The walls in both locations were breached during the devastating flood of November 19 last when millions of gallons of water were released from the ESB dam at Inniscarra.

Engineers shored up the holes using vast quantities of rubble and rock armour and both damaged sections have been cordoned off since.

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It will take five to six weeks to assess and decide on a successful tender but construction work on the damaged section of quay walls will commence soon and is expected to last 30 weeks.

Consultants were hired by Cork City Council to prepare detailed specifications on what exactly is required to ensure there is no repeat of what happened in the November 2009 floods when sections of the quay walls collapsed.

Some €900,000 was earmarked June from the flood relief scheme for the repair of the damaged quay walls but Mr Winning said that Cork City Council had added to this to allow the additional work be done.

This additional work would see the repair of the quay walls at nine additional locations other than at Grenville Place where some 20m of wall collapsed and at Sunday’' Well where a large section of wall collapsed.

These additional locations would include cases where individual blocks may have fallen from low down on the quay walls below the high-tide level, leading to concern about the structural integrity of the walls even though there may not have been any breach.

(BMcC/GK)