Disciplinary action to be taken against drainage board staff -Luncheon
Stabroek News
June 2, 2002
Disciplinary action, including dismissal and suspension, is being set in train for personnel attached to the National Drainage and Irrigation Board (NDIB) following the findings that the government agency was partly culpable for last November's East Demerara Water Conservancy (EDWC) dam breach.
Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, made this disclosure to Stabroek News on Wednesday following his weekly press conference. Luncheon said the action would be implemented as soon as the details were worked out. The other party blamed in the breach fiasco was contracting company B.K. International Inc.
The Attorney-General's Chambers was tasked with recommending penalties and remedial measures to be taken and government has since sued the company for $50 million.
The administration is seeking $25 million for alleged breach of contract for the rehabilitation of the EDWC dam and structures from Cane Grove to Annandale, East Coast Demerara, plus damages and pecuniary compensation. The other $25 million is for damage and losses caused by alleged negligence by B.K. its servants and/or agents in the performance and obligations under the contract. The breach resulted in millions of dollars in damage to the homes and livelihood of residents in the surrounding areas.
An EDWC breach investigation team was convened on November 9 by presidential instruction to ascertain the factors, which contributed to the collapse behind Cane Grove, East Coast Demerara. The team's terms of reference included a technical assessment of the engineering works on the dam and to make recommendations on appropriate remedial measures to other risk areas on the dam, and preventative maintenance to the structure in general.
The probe team found that the NDIB went ahead with the decision to raise the dam without wider consultation with EDWC commissioners, in response to the perceived importance of not flooding the residents of the lower Mahaica River at any time by using the Maduni relief structures.
The team said that given the fragile nature of the dam and the relatively stable state that had been reached in the structure over the 100 years of its existence, a complex undertaking of that nature should not have been attempted until a full feasibility study had been done.
The team found that technical support from the NDIB was weak. In accordance with the contract, the chief executive officer of the NDIB, Ravi Narain, was the approved engineer for the project.
Three persons acted as the engineer's representative during the execution of the project. There was one engineer's assistant. The team found that none of the persons identified as the engineer's representatives nor engineer's assistant had previous experience in earthen dam construction for a conservancy.
In its report, the team stated that during the execution of the works, the necessary mechanisms, which should have been put in place to ensure the proper construction of the dam were lacking. The engineer should have provided a surveyor to monitor the works and to ensure they were carried out to the lines and levels required. Instead, the only staff member on the site was the engineer's assistant and he could only witness the surveys that were being done by the contractor, but could not check the surveys for correctness.
Since work was taking place simultaneously on each site, there should have been at least one engineer's assistant for each site, the team reported. This would have meant total control at each location by the engineer.
The team felt that more site inspections should have been made by the engineer or his representative to resolve issues of a more technical nature that could not have been handled by the engineer's assistant.
The fact that the one engineer's assistant was required to move along nearly 40 miles of dam on a daily basis to monitor the work at the different sites could have resulted in the contractor not executing the construction in accordance with the specifications during his inevitable absence from a particular site, the team concluded.