Months of Delays, But Where’s the Progress in River Valley?

For months, drivers in the Belize River Valley have been navigating traffic bottlenecks at the Sebastian and Bermudian Landing bridges, with many asking why the work appears to be moving so slowly. While frustration is growing among commuters who say they have seen little visible progress, government engineers insist the project remains on schedule and involves far more than meets the eye.

 

Evondale Moody, Chief Engineer, MIDH

“We have a contract with Cayo Steel. They are doing the rehabilitation of two bridges in the River Valley, the Sebastian and Bermudian Landing bridges. Both structures have two different lanes, in and out. So we are retabulating those structures to see how best we can extend the design life for those structures. We have asked the contractors to work on one side at a time, hence the reason one side has been removed from the bridge structures, while he does the sand blasting and maintenance work on each one. That project is expected to last about eighteen months and so yes we just started in March, but we still have a long time to go to rehabilitate those structures. Those structures have been there for quite a long time and no maintenance have been done or very little. So we took the initiative to see how best we can upgrade those structures. We just ask the public’s patients with us. It will take a while for us to complete those structures, because each structure has to be removed and each member has to be sandblasted and painted and put back in place. We understand there is a number of villages back there and tourism areas. However we have liaised with those villages with our personnel we have on site to explain the scope of works for that area.”

 

Moody says his ministry doing the best it can with the resources it has.

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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