Editorial | Eye on road repair

Nothing symbolises the state of Jamaica’s roads – and the urgency of doing something about them – better than the case in October of Venroy ‘Bigga’ Blackwood.

Mr Blackwood, 58, lived in Ridge Pen, St Elizabeth, in southwestern Jamaica. On a dark night, Mr Blackwood, who may have been inebriated, was riding his bicycle in his community.

The circumstantial evidence suggests that he rode into a crater left behind by a water repair crew, fell face first into the puddle, and drowned.

The Blackwood incident is perhaps bizarre, recently associated with Jamaica’s potholes, but the St Elizabeth crater is not the only one believed to have contributed to someone’s death.

Indeed, earlier this week, Lucien Jones, chairman of the National Road Safety Council (NRSC), called for an accelerated fixing of potholes after an elderly woman died in a traffic crash. The vehicle in which she was travelling reportedly swerved to avoid a pothole.

“... People are losing their lives,” Dr Jones said. “This is the second one within about a month that, reportedly, someone swerved to avoid a pothole and crashed, and someone died.”

MAJOR INCREASE

It is not known how many of the 342 crash fatalities so far this year are attributable to potholes, but, at least anecdotally, there appears to be a major increase in the claims of motorists that their crashes were caused by manoeuvres to avoid potholes.

But it is not only the contribution of poor road surfaces to crashes and deaths that causes angst to Jamaica’s motorists. There is, too, the wear and tear on their vehicles, especially front ends, which government officials, including Prime Minister Holness, have acknowledged. It is not known for what proportion of this figure front-end parts are responsible, but Jamaica annually spends over US$200 million (J$31.5 billion) on vehicle spares.

Further, Jamaica faces major traffic snarls, especially in its urban centres, because too many vehicles have to use roads that weren’t designed for the volume of traffic. The Jamaica jams translate to hundreds of million of man hours lost to work and people’s pursuance of leisure.

And, as Mr Holness observed this week, these traffic gridlocks are exacerbated by the presence of potholes and drivers’ efforts to negotiate them.

Against this backdrop, the prime minister saying that Jamaica’s potholes crisis is a “national emergency” is entirely appropriate. He should formally declare the situation as such and assign the Jamaica Defence Force’s (JDF) engineering corps to work with other government agencies to tackle the problem.

Nonetheless, we welcome the prime minister’s announcement of the Government’s plans to spend J$2 billion on emergency patching, ahead of a J$45 billion programme of road rehabilitation. A contract for the latter project was signed on Thursday with China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC).

We appreciate that, given the urgency of the matter, the smaller, immediate job won’t be subject to public tender.

The government’s National Works Agency (NWA), Mr Holness said, had 21 contractors of the appropriate grade who can be engaged using emergency procurement measures “to get the patching and reinstatement of roads to driveable conditions done”.

PORK BARRELS

But the fact that this is an emergency, or that Jamaica is into an election campaign, doesn’t mean a forfeiture of quality and/or effective oversight. In other words, neither project, the emergency works nor the larger rehabilitation exercise, should be election pork barrels.

The government and the NWA must avoid the scandals and scandalous arrangements of the 2016 verge cleaning and maintenance project, preceding municipal elections, upon which a former contractor general reported.

We take the prime minister at his word that these jobs will be done with professionalism and transparency, which we also take to mean that there will be no recurrence of the problems at the CHEC-built, recently opened, Southern Coastal Highway, which endured major failures at the first big rains.

Subcontractors were reported to have supplied and used low-quality materials on segments of the highway, in breach of engineering and design standards. Which raises questions about oversight, including the role played by quantity surveyors on that project and what is expected of them on the coming ones.

This newspaper has a suggestion: the Jamaica Institute of Engineers, the regulatory body, should volunteer to have an independent team of its members work with a good governance/anti-corruption organisation, Jamaica Accountability Meter Portal, to monitor the road projects to ensure that taxpayers get value for their money.