The Ministry of Public Works says that it had expected contractors working on the East Bank Demerara four-lane extension to work overtime to complete the project, noting that it expects them to now finish it by the extended March deadline.
“We know that they had a lot of delays, but still we expected to see a little more in terms of the project management, working double shift, day and night but that did not happen,” Geoffrey Vaughn, Coordinator of the Work Services Group (WSG) at the ministry told the Government Information Agency (GINA) in a recent interview.
Vaughn reiterated that while the ministry cannot pressure the contractors to work into the night, the onus is on them to put in the extra hours to complete the project. It is a “contractual obligation” which the government can only propose. “If they need to, and they want to, they can work night time, it does not take away anything from the contract, but it is for them to make that call,” he said. The ministry’s responsibility is to ensure that the work is done and that the contract is completed within the stipulated time or it would invoke the penalty clause.
The project is funded under an Inter-American Development Bank loan to the tune of US$22M. It entails expanding two traffic lanes to four along the East Bank Demerara road from Providence to Diamond. It is being executed in three lots: from Providence to Prospect, Prospect to Little Diamond, and Little Diamond to the Diamond Intersection. The first and second lots of the project were scheduled to be completed by December 31, 2014. To date, Lot One is approximately 56 per cent completed; Lot Two, 90 per cent completed and Lot Three 60 per cent completed.
The relocation of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph utilities continues to be the major cause of the delays, the GINA report said. The ministry has had several meetings with GT&T pertaining to the issue and has signed contracts with the utility company to facilitate their removal. “Most of it is that they are not too sure that they have cables… so we have to wait until they acquire these things and they have to do designs,” Vaughn said. “When we would have gone into the contract with GT&T, then they would have been pushing to get y, get z, so you find that itself caused some amount of delays, so as much as you want to blame the contractors on one hand in terms of not being able to work effectively and in a faster manner, we still have to look at some of the other issues that we had on the contract.”
Lot One has now been extended to March 2015, due to the utility issue. Lot Two’s delay was initially caused by rainfall in 2013 but, more recently the contractor Dipcon has had a cash flow problem, the GINA report said.
Nevertheless, Lot Two is nearest to completion and should be wrapping up soon as the road has been opened to traffic. Lot Three contractor BK Inter-national is expected to complete its section by March, which is the time extended to it to bring the project to a close. The extra time given for the completion of this section and Lot Two was to facilitate the removal of utilities. There was also evidence of poor organising skills, construction methodology and lack of human resources during the construction of Lot Three, Vaughn stated in the GINA report.
BK International has completed some of the road works and is now focusing on the high bridge next to Demerara Distillers Limited. “Once that is completed we know that work will be pushed faster,” Vaughn said. The ministry will be monitoring the completion of the work to ensure that the project closes before March 2015.
While Lot Two is near completion there are still some aspects to be done and work corrected. There are areas that are not smooth enough that will also have to be corrected. Vaughn also said that the matter pertaining to the removal of GT&T’s infrastructure would not preclude the ministry from applying liquidated damages to the contractors due to the delay in completion of work.
