Hurricane Beryl Delays Coastal Plains Highway Repairs

The approaching Hurricane Beryl has delayed the Ministry of Infrastructure Development and Housing’s plans to repair the Coastal Plains Highway. Sections of the highway were damaged by heavy flooding and rains last month, and the MIDH had determined that the cost of repairs would be over three hundred thousand dollars. Opposition leader Moses Shyne Barrow recently condemned the government for saving six million dollars on the construction of the highway, saying that it impacted the quality of the work. Chief Engineer with the MIDH, Evondale Moody, clarified that the savings did not come at the cost of the scope of work done on the highway.

Evondale Moody, Chief Engineer, MIDH: “The original cost that we have is $350,000 in terms of doing the concrete pavement that I mentioned because we would have to treat it as a floodway now because of what has occurred at those two culverts. So the idea is that we want to concrete that entire area. And so with those additional works, the estimate we have is around $350,000 for us to do those repairs. In terms of the savings that we keep repeating that we try to make on these projects, these are from the contingencies. Alright, so the project itself has a specified value, but we usually add on a 10% contingency and that is used in the event we decide that we need to do other works. Those works were not necessarily needed on the coastal highway and so those funds were used to assist in upgrading Gales Point road, access road, and we also used some of those funds to upgrade the Mullins River Road and we did some work in Hope Creek as well and Sarrawee. So what they’re saying in terms of  reducing the scope of work we did not do that whatever was designed and implemented for the coastal highway was implemented in accordance with the conditions of contract. So we never reduced anything in terms of scope of works on the coastal road itself, so that is not correct.”

Moody says that those repairs will have to wait until after whatever work will need to be done once Beryl has passed.