Last week we told you about the plan to start road works on all of Central American Boulevard. Well, it started yesterday with the trenching of street side where the BTL cables run. But, it's not being done by some big time contractor with tones of heavy equipment, instead, it's manual labour getting the job done the old fashioned way with shovels and pick axes. It might not seem thoroughly modern, but it's a way to generate employment for young men from tough neighborhoods who can't find gainful employment anywhere else. Today we found them working hard and making good progress:..
Reina Gonzalez, supervisor
"We started yesterday at around 10am and well as you can see we have more than 200 feet of trench of the BTL trench ready for us to set the pipes on and back fill. So we can say in a day's work the guys basically work 200 feet of trench with the dimensions of 2 feet and 3 feet deep. We are seeing that man power is proving effective for us so far."
"Something like this traditionally it's done with the back hoe, with a 24 inch or 12 inch bucket and basically who you will have working? It will be the operator and maybe 2 people supervising and maybe another 2 laying down the pipes and checking that everything is going okay. That is a total of roughly 5 people doing the same thing. Right now we are starting and we have a group of 20 guys doing the manual labour and I have 5 of my guys checking that we meet the specifications and we have another 2 guys dealing with the man holes, so we basically have a total of around 27 people working right now."
Jules Vasquez
"How has the moral spirit and effort of these guys been so far?"
Reina Gonzalez, supervisor
"They are ready to work, believe me. Actually they were waiting for me at 9am, but we went through planning, we went through issuing safety gears and actually man power started at 10am. So they are more than willing to work. As soon as they finish a section, I tell them we have another thing. They are willing to jump into that and what I like about this crew is their team leader has complete control over them and when it comes to us meeting the specifications - if we go back and tell them 'you know what you need to grind this a little bit more, you need to dig this a little more,' they are not upstart, they are always willing because they know that is what the job entails. We are working along with them pretty good right now."
Jules Vasquez
"How far do we have to go?"
Reina Gonzalez, supervisor
"This is all the way to port trenching for BTL is all the way to port. We will be doing some trenching for BWS also, so this is going all the way to port. When we finish with the trenching, we will be starting with the concreting of the boulevard, so we have fairly a one year's job here."
The subcontractor and foreman at that site is Kenneth Big Tom Flowers.
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