Overrun in costs has been blamed for the latest missed deadline for the completion of the US$15M Hope Canal Project, which was expected to be done by December 31, 2014.
The Government Information Agency (GINA) quoted cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon as saying that most of the work is completed and the eight-door sluice is soon to be completed.
Luncheon said, “Once you have expenditure that cannot be recovered, expenditure will have to be made…so the government will complete it if it is needed. If defects have to be corrected, and funds are not available, you can’t recover it from the consultant, we will have to correct it.”
Further, Luncheon said when the project is completed, along with the defect liability period, netting off will have to be done.
There is some expenditure which contractors and consultants have to bear for the purposes of the overrun, Luncheon said, but it also depends on what can be recovered.
There has been no further date given for the completion of the project.
Engineer Charles Sohan, in a letter published in the January 6, 2015 edition of Stabroek News, said based on aerial photos of the project, taken in early December 2014, a “tremendous amount of work” is yet to be done to make Hope Canal Project operational.
Sohan, who expected the announcement of a new deadline, noted that the project is far from completion and unlikely to be fully operational for another year or so before flood waters could be safely released from the East Demerara Water Conservancy into the Atlantic Ocean.
“The unfinished channel to be dug through the foreshore from the sluice to the ocean is just one of those “few minor works left to be done” as claimed,” he also wrote.
