And while the mayor may have his hands full with flood mitigation, another project that is surely keeping him busy is the 3 month initiative to replace 3 thousand 6 hundred manholes and drain covers in the City. If you or anyone you know has ever fallen in one then you’d understand the urgency of these works. But the project has been experiencing setbacks because of the rains and other technical complications. The works started about three weeks ago and have 12 weeks to go before they should cover all the manholes as proposed by the project. Mayor Bradley gave us an update today.
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
"We've seen much improvement in relation to how it looks. Actually I did an inspection in relation to some of them and you can visibly see the fact that you in many cases have old sidewalks with these brand new manhole covers. And one of the reasons that we decided to do this is because of the interest in wanting to make Belize City more child friendly and more safe and secure and we upgrading a significant amount of the carriage way but one of the areas which I would concede that we have neglected is sufficient attention to drainage and also sufficient attention to the sidewalk and the manhole covers and we just wanted to ensure that when kids for example are walking on the streets it's a safe walk for them."
But while covering manholes is one thing, the quality of those coverings are quite another. And reports to us say there have already been several manhole covers that are fractured and broken since the works began three weeks ago. But according to the Mayor that is all being dealt with and the public can rest assured that value for money is at a premium:
Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor
"Well one of the things that we looked at in relation to the discussion with the manhole itself is we kind of discussed preliminarily at the council level in terms of the type of material because we were looking at whether or not we should construct these out of iron. One of the things we've noticed though is that people steal and sell the iron. We did a significant amount of earlier manhole repairs out of wood but we've noticed that the wood again when people drive over the manholes they break right away and then in terms of the sturdiness in relation to the wood that doesn't last at all. One of the concerns when we spoke about whether or not we should have concrete manhole covers is that it tends to be very hard to remove and if you see those manholes, the maintenance crew tends to not to clean the drains under them; so that was one of the concerns that we have. We've had issues in relation to the quality of some of the holes that have gone down and this is why I'm telling you that this is a 3 month project. Everything this is including in relation to when we were doing the concrete projects we are at a 168 concrete streets. I cannot guarantee you and I will make no such guarantee that we will get a perfect pour in relation to all of them."
"In relation to the manhole covers project we were looking at in relation to several of them that were not accepted by us. We are at 15 percent of the project, we caught that very early. I believe that one of our councillor shared with either you or Jules Vasquez a report which we did in relation to those of the manhole covers that we were not satisfied with; again when we do these contracts we pay mobilization and we keep the balance of the funds until you complete our project. So that there is no way that the citizens of Belize City would be out of pocket."
Works are being done by Mora’s Construction, a company out of Sandhill through a three hundred thousand dollar loan from SSB.
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