Silt, Sea and Coastal Engineering

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Sridhar Raghavan can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/09/silt-sea-and-coastal-engineering/. About the post: In 1870, the Vedaranyam canal is built connecting the Salt Pans nearby Palk bay coasts 5 to Nagapattinam – serving twin purposes of cheap transport of salt to Nagapattinam for trade, as well as deepening the river channels slightly upstream of the Port. A permanent wharf was constructed from some of the dredged sand in the 1870s. But dredging was repeatedly claimed as costly. Equally, the cyclone of 1862 damaged the extended river mouth groynes, and the British were able to repair them only by 1865. In 1909, experimental groynes erected at a distance from the river mouth were destroyed and washed away further south during the North East monsoon – which the Port Officer describes as “It will be seen by the above that these exposed groynes cannot withstand the fury of the northeast monsoon, and any expenditure on this account will be a waste of money”. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)