The Ministry of Public Infrastructure yesterday dispatched a team to assess the Guyana Revenue Authority head office on Camp Street after a tremor caused cracks in several parts of the building.
Minister David Patterson told Stabroek News last evening that half a dozen new cracks were found by the team of structural engineers. These would have developed due to tremors from an earthquake off of Barbados at around 11.20 am.
After the initial tremor was felt Patterson stated that he received a call from Finance Minister Winston Jordan requesting assistance with assessing the state of the building.
Patterson said that for now the building was safe for occupancy but noted that this would be in the short term. He said that in the long term the GRA would need to address where its main offices would be located as the current building “is not designed to take the amount of occupancy GRA has.”
The minister said that “the immediate perils were indicative of the tremor because the building is being overused.”
He said that “there is no imminent danger of collapsing on workers, but in the long term the GRA will have to make an assessment on how they will proceed.”
Patterson said that his team reported that there are issues but he did not divulge the extent. He noted that there would be existing issues because the building would have been completed using the aged foundation and superstructure left over from the Guyana Sugar Corporation, which had envisioned moving its administrative offices there in the early 1990s.
He said that workers can return to work today. Yesterday, many workers were unsure of what to expect with many loitering outside of the building well after the tremor.
This newspaper understands that some staffers were told to go home as a result of the new cracks that appeared.
One staffer told Stabroek News that after the initial tremor was felt on the upper floors, a decision was made to evacuate the building as a large crack was seen on the outside of the building and another near the stairwell. From 11:30hrs to 13:00hrs staffers went to lunch and began trickling in where they stayed until the decision was made to send everyone home pending the engineers completing their assessment.
The staffer told Stabroek News that persons on the lower floors barely felt the tremor, however employees on the top floor were shaken and very concerned.
Efforts by Stabroek News yesterday to contact GRA Commissioner-General Khurshid Sattaur failed.
After the GuySuCo superstructure had been left unused for many years, CLICO purchased the property and began building a gargantuan structure for its head office and related companies. When CLICO went bust in 2009 the National Insurance Scheme ac-quired the building as an offset for money owed to it by CLICO.
The GRA then rented the building to serve as its head office. Around $225m was spent by the state to modify it for use by the GRA.
