On May 30th, the major artery Thomas Lands was closed for two weeks for the latest in several attempts to comprehensively repair defects on the road.
In a notice, the Ministry of Public Works said it had engaged the contractor, JKP Construction, to undertake the rehabilitation of Thomas Lands. No information was immediately available on the size of this contract or the cost.
The travails of Thomas Lands bear careful consideration in the context of value for money and whether judicious procurement decisions are being made. It should be recalled that this year’s astronomical budget of $1.146 trillion allocates $204 billion – roughly one-fifth of the total – for the construction of roads and bridges across Guyana.
Many invitations for tenders have been issued for roads and bridges in all parts of the country. If these works are well done they would inevitable ease transportation woes for people around the country. The work must however be well done and supervised and not be in need of remediation in a short space of time. That, of course, has been the case with Thomas Lands and if it could have happened there it certainly can recur in many parts of the country remote from the centre and where defects don’t come to prominent notice.
On May 11, 2022, seven months after Stabroek News asked questions about it, the $30m rehabilitation of a sunken part of Thomas Lands got underway. A 200-metre stretch was to be repaired within a three- month time frame. The contractor was Pooran Manman General Contracting Services.
Stabroek News had published a news item on November 19, 2021 showing the road slippage. In a follow-up article on December 17, 2021 Minister of Public Works, Juan Edghill, in an interview with this newspaper had said that the authorities were seeking the best option that would ensure the stability of the road. “We just can’t build the road, we have to be able to put in the correct engineering solutions,” he observed quite properly.
The minister went on to say that the placing of a revetment, or the use of geotextile or geo-cells to ensure the stability of the road was under consideration.
The repairs were duly completed within months and the road reopened. By August, 2022, just a few months after repairs had been completed, a pothole opened up and deterioration was seen along other parts. How could this have happened so quickly?
Minister Edghill later explained to this newspaper that the pothole had developed due to the failure of the asphalt layer. “The problem was…and he (the company’s contractor) was told by the engineers who have been investigating to see what’s happening, the day when he (the contractor) placed the asphalt, he did not have a ten-ton roller to compress the asphalt so instead he used a three-ton roller.”
“So because the asphalt is not properly compressed, because it didn’t have the required weight-roller to compress it, so when the rain falls with all of that intensity, the water goes between and that’s what causing the cracking, resulting in the failure of the asphalt, it has nothing to do with the technology, it has to do with bad compression,” Mr Edghill said.
So poor contracting resulted in the failure of work that had been done just months before. Why didn’t the supervising engineer immediately raise alarms about the divergence from requirements? The contractor was called back to the worksite and proceeded to do repairs which supposedly were financed by a portion of the contract money that was retained.
Even after the repairs, the road continue to show evidence of slippage and failures. The contracting work had simply been poor.
Another contractor has now been employed at a yet unpublicised cost. Will this be the end or a recurring decimal?
There should be an accountability framework for Thomas Lands to serve as a lesson to those who are undertaking road works in particular. Was the work done by the contractor prior to Pooran Manman General Contracting Services of acceptable standard and guaranteed longevity? What was the cost of those works?
Was the technology and methodology employed by Pooran Manman General Contracting Services appropriate? Should there have been greater attention to revetment on both sides of the road to prevent subsidence towards the trench particularly given the increasingly heavy weights traversing the roads?
Have lessons been learned from the Pooran Manman General Contracting Services experience and have these resulted in a better plan under this new contractor? What additional expenditure has been incurred to the state as a result of the poor work by the contractor? Were their penalties exacted against the contractor? These are accountability questions that the Ministry of Public Works and the government should answer.
