A new city is rising from the sea

Dubai: A new city will rise from the sea when the Palm Deira is complete.

The luxurious offshore development one of three palm shaped islands being built by Nakheel along Dubai's coastline will be home to more than one million residents. And there may never be a need to return to the mainland as the city will include a host of malls, clubs and sporting facilities.

Controversy has surrounded the projects recently with some reports suggesting disgruntled homeowners will have to wait up to ten years before they can move onto the island allegations which Nakheel has denied.

The developer has so far sold about 40 per cent of the project's first phase.

"The projects are built in stages, so whatever is finished is handed over to us for development, the thing that may take the longest time are the hotels because they are built by individual developers," said Nakheel spokeswoman Tammy Farha. She adamantly denied Nakheel was calling off the Palm Deira project or sales had been frozen after Dutch-based dredging company Van Oord estimated land reclamation could take up to eight years.

Van Oord was awarded the Dh16 billion contract to build the Deira site including the Corniche and the Palm. The area is almost twice the size of the other two Palms at Jumeirah and Jebel Ali. Work began in 2001.

"We started with Palm Jumeirah, that was one of the first big land reclamations for the Palms. In total there is 1.2 billion cubic metres of sand for this project, protected by 70 million tonnes of rock," said Jan Schaart, director of Van Oord Gulf.

"The ships we use are special because they dredge the sand up to a depth of 35 metres of water. It brings the sand on board and takes it from the burrow area to the reclamation area," added Schaart. Dredging continues 21 hours a day, seven days a week and Van Oord has a third of its entire fleet in Dubai. The firm has also worked on the impressive World project, hundreds if islands 4km off the coast of Dubai shaped like a map of the Earth. Marwan Al Qamzi, head of procurement and contracts at Nakheel, claims the project is slightly ahead of schedule. "The progress of land reclamation is remarkable.

"With this latest reclamation project, we can now transport materials on to the island, thus moving the development on to the next level," he added.