Interior roads much improved

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DPI, Guyana, Tuesday, August 28, 2018

The Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) says interior roads will be in a state of readiness before the next rainy season as works have already started.

Special Projects Manager, Arun Richard says as of May 3 almost $700M in contracts have been awarded to MMC, D and R Construction and International Imports and Supplies for maintenance of sections of roads from Linden to Kwakwani and Linden to Lethem.

“The road will be in a state of readiness for the next rainy season and equipment and labour would have been deployed to the site, so it makes the entire effort before and during the rainy season a bit more manageable. From Rockstone to Mabura that has been just about five percent complete to date given the rainy condition and the state of that road at the time of the award the maintenance of Kurupukari to Annai that’s about fifty percent complete that’s the backlogged worked to bring it to a state of usability and then the contractor will have to maintain it for one year. The maintenance of Annai to Lethem that’s thirty-five percent complete; the maintenance of Linden to Ituni that’s eighty percent complete and Ituni to Kwakwani also eighty percent complete. As a matter of fact, from Linden to Kwakwani you can now safely drive in about an hour,” Richard said.

He added that going forward the GGMC will be placing greater emphasis on ensuring the responsible use of the unpaved roads especially during the rainy season. “Ideally an engineer will prefer the roads not to be used in a saturated condition so we would like to see better policing of the interior roads where you restrict traffic when the road is supersaturated and you allow traffic to go when some amount of drying off would have occurred. Secondly, and more importantly, is the adherence to load limits.”

According to Richard, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) has traditionally rendered assistance to the mining community through road repairs and maintenance. Recently, there has been a directive that saw the Ministry of Public Infrastructure, Ministry of Natural Resources and the Guyana Forestry Commission (GFC) among other stakeholders coming together to decide on the way forward. GGMC is currently paying the full cost for the works despite there are other agencies such as the Ministry of Public Infrastructure that might be funding roads under their budgets as well.

By: Kidackie Amsterdam

Image: Tejpaul Bridgemohan.

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