The Drainage and Irrigation Department (DID) plans to remove some of the earth from the two "islands" in the middle of the Likas Lagoon.

This follows public suspicions that there may be an attempt to deliberately dry up the lagoon so as to make it suitable for commercial development.

A DID spokesman said this would be done once it had an allocation for this purpose.

"It will cost quite a bit to transport the soil away due to the presence of the water which separates the islands from the banks of the lagoon," he said.

He stressed that the lagoon could not be earmarked for a development of any kind.

"The public should not be unduly alarmed by the work being carried out here as no commercial or residential development of any sort can take place on this land." He said the lagoon itself had been gazetted as a "flood mitigation pond".

"In the meantime, our workers are in the process of dredging up the sediment from the lagoon bed as part of the Department's maintenance efforts," he said, to a Likas jogger's misgivings about the expanding size of the islands.

The individual was under the impression that a building of some sort may be coming up as excavators seemed to be covering part of the lagoon with earth.

However, the spokesman refuted claims on the girth of the islands, saying that they were not getting "bigger".

"Our workers are topping up the islands so they are actually getting smaller and higher," he said.

Earlier in March, the Department stated that "routine" cleaning of the lagoon was being performed, with the sediment being excavated to increase the capacity of the water. "We have had to clarify that no development of any sort is taking place here twice so far this month.

This article was extracted from Daily Express.