BK International has condemned “in the strongest possible terms” every effort being made by the Public Works Ministry to publicly shift blame for the delays in the East Bank Demerara public road four-lane extension project from the said ministry and GT&T to it.
In a press release, BK International Managing Director Brian Tiwarie said Coordinator of the Works Services Group Geoffrey Vaughn, the consultants and the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph (GT&T) are all well aware of the inordinate delays imposed on the company during the life of the project. The contractor is particularly concerned that Vaughn has cast the company “in a negative light charging that BK International demonstrated poor organising skills and construction methodology, and a lack of human resources.”
Vaughn’s statements were made in an interview with GINA on Monday.
While Vaughn acknowledges that the GT&T cables have been the primary cause of all the delays in Lot Three of the project, he failed to state that it has taken three years to have all the cables removed, BK said. This activity was only completed on December 22, 2014 as confirmed in a letter dated December 30, 2014 from GT&T to Vaughn, the contractor said. In the same letter, GT&T indicated to the coordinator that “there is still a buried cable (50 pairs) comprising of part of DDL’s internal network cable” that has to be removed, the company said. According to the press release, GT&T’s representative Roderick Dyer in a letter to Vaughn further said that there is “potential jeopardy” of it being damaged again.
BK said that the DDL underground internal network cable, located from the Diamond bridge to DDL’s administration building has, to date, been the cause of the delay in the completion of the road, bridge, kerb, and drain works that will facilitate the free-flow of double lane traffic on the right hand side of the western carriageway. As a result, this has caused further overall delays in the project. “Mr Vaughn was very well aware of this situation when he made his remarks to GINA but failed to mention it,” BK said. Further, on January 13, GT&T technicians marked another cable that is located across the road between one of the DDL installations and the GT&T tower at a depth of approximately 29 inches putting that area in “potential jeopardy” of being damaged again.
BK took further umbrage at Vaughn’s remarks that the company failed to demonstrate effective project management by not scheduling extra and night shifts to complete the work. “Again, the coordinator is making statements that are in direct contradiction with known facts,” the company said. As recently as December 2014 BK crews worked nights, early mornings before sunrise and on Sundays to complete the crossings and paving of the western carriageway so that additional sections of the road could be opened before the traffic rush at Christmas, the press release said.
BK says that the ministry, the consultants and GT&T were fully aware of the undue delays encountered by the company during the project. The company said it had registered its concerns weekly in letters to the consultants and on several occasions had highlighted the matter publicly, including taking the media on tours to the site to point out the cables that were in jeopardy in the construction area. The delays have been a significant financial burden to the company and “it is in our interest to have the project completed in the shortest possible time.”
In a press release issued on September 19, 2014 Tiwarie said “the problem with this East Bank Expansion Project is that the Ministry of Public Works is not doing a good job of management and supervision and as a result the work is constantly being extended by delay after delay.” Tiwarie had even predicted that the delays would have caused the project to be extended to 2015 or beyond. “As a company we continue to lose money on equipment and labour stationed on the East Bank every time there is a delay,” he said. Yesterday, he said if the WSG coordinator “had spent time to iron out the problems between the contractor and GT&T the construction work could have been finished two years ago and there would be no need for him to now be spending time in the media making accusations.”
In his GINA interview, Vaughn said that the ministry expects that contractors will finish the East Bank road expansion by the extended March deadline.
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.
