Georgetown : Minister of Agriculture Dr. Leslie Ramsammy has disclosed now that no date has been set for the East Demerara Water Conservancy (EDWC) Northern Relief Channel at Hope/Dochfour, however the Minister pointed out that the contractors and the engineers are working to make the project operational as early as possible.
Minister Ramsammy visited the project yesterday to get a first-hand look at the progress. He was accompanied by the Chief Executive Officer, National Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA), Lionel Wordsworth.
One of the four components of the project; the Hope Bridge has been completed and Minister Ramsammy explained that it was considered essentially finished before the December 31 deadline.
“After so many visits, where we were looking at structures going up, we are now standing on a bridge with vehicles which we ourselves drove, over this bridge…in terms of the contract that we have for the completion of this bridge, it is essentially completed. There are some landscaping work and so to be done, for this bridge, but that is outside of the contract for this bridge,” he said.
The channel which will be the last aspect to be completed is 95 percent done, and cannot be fully realised until the project is ready to be operational. Minister Ramsammy explained that the reason why the incompletion is that “we cannot open this channel to the sea or to the conservancy. We have to await the readiness of the whole project before we can complete the channel.”
There is also the shaping of the dam, “but as I have said all of 2013, the dams will be shaped and reshaped over a period of time, and it is possible that a year, two year from now, we will still be doing some reshaping of the dam, but that does not affect the function of the channel,” he said.
The head regulator is sufficiently completed in terms of the superstructure. Minister Ramsammy noted that outside of the superstructure, the elements of the project that need to be completed will be done over the next several weeks.
The component of the project that posed the greatest challenge has been the sluice towards the sea side, but the ministry has worked with the contractor towards moving this aspect.
“I believe that going back into November (of 2013) there was a sense of hopelessness among many people to the extent where some people seriously considered terminating that contract, but within the Ministry of Agriculture and particularly within the NDIA, the engineers and the consultants believed that the termination of that contract would in fact have prolonged the completion date and we needed to work with the contractor.
I want to commend the contractors for the work they been doing with the ministry, and with the NDIA team, they have worked in accordance with a work plan,” Minister Ramsammy said.
The ministry and the contractor have agreed to have the outstanding work divided into several tranches, some of which are to be completed by February. The first few tranches would realise the completion of the super structure for the sluice, he said.
Work is on pace right now to complete six tranches by mid February and that would bring it to a stage where the super structure for the four projects would be essentially completed, paving the way for the project’s operationalisation, he explained.
