April, August completion dates for bridges

Chad Bryan, Gleaner Writer

It is the start of a new work and school week, and you try desperately to wake early in order to avoid the traffic jams, menacing taxi and minibus drivers who believe they own the road and schoolchildren who sluggishly drag themselves along.

Coming from Red Hills or surrounding areas to make your way from the gas station at the foot of the hill, as you head into the commercial heart of the capital, you encounter the very problems you had hoped to avoid.

It results in large part from the work being done to make a bridge at the ford near Queensborough on Molynes Road - and if that is not enough, trying to negotiate your way past Cassia Park is no different as work is being done there also.

The situation should change soon, however. Stephen Shaw, communications and customer services manager at the National Work Agency (NWA), has noted that the Cassia Park Bridge will be completed in August, while the Queensborough Bridge is slated for completion in April.

Former minister of transport and works Mike Henry explained that in 2005 the Cassia Park Bridge would cost an estimated $52.44 million, but under JDIP would cost $183 million in 2010, while the Queensborough Bridge cost was estimated at $45.52 million in 2005 and $154 million under JDIP.

Both bridges were slated to have been completed before the end of the last financial year.

In April 2003, Lawrence Calderon, a St Lucian, and Shipping Association of Jamaica (SAJ) president Pauline Gray drowned when the vehicle they were travelling in was swept away in the Cassia Park Gully. The bridge being constructed there has a 38-metre span.