Minister says wharf repairs are within budget

The Ministry of Public Works, the Hon. Trevor Moniz JP MP today responded to the misleading headline in the Monday, June 3 edition of The Royal Gazette and clarified that the repairs to Heritage Wharf Project are not $6 million over budget.

The Minister explained that the budget is the amount of money allocated for this project and not the amount of money spent to date. There is no requirement for the Government to spend the entire budget. The budget was allocated for the whole project to cover the costs of engineering the solution, construction works as well as complying with the various requirements.

The Minister further stated that the spending to date on the project was under $20 million and provided a more detailed breakdown of the anticipated costs as follows: the actual tendered cost of the contract with Sunrise Construction Limited was for $22.4 million; Structural Inspection, Assessment and Design works with site technical support from Mott MacDonald (approximately $600,000), Geotechnical Investigations (approximately $300,000), pre-contract ordering of essential construction materials $550,000.00). These figures include costs for the Kings Wharf investigation regarding the structural integrity and the Ground Transportation Area passenger management study.

Funding is also being provided for long term environmental monitoring, a broad reaching transportation study and landscaping and shading facilities in the Ground Transportation Area in accordance with the conditions of this planning application and the previous planning application that were not met.

As you would expect with a project of this size where the works were undertaken under severe time constraints we have also allowed a contingency in our budgeting. This contingency will be used to pay for those items listed above which were not fully identified at the budget stage as well as any other unforeseen construction delays and costs all of which will be fully identified in the final accounts. This contingency makes up the difference of the total of the costs listed above and the budget of $28 million.

The Minister is pleased to report that we are presently forecast to be within this budget and we hope to remain so. It should be noted however that the full extent of repair works to Heritage Wharf and the surrounding area has not yet been determined or costed. The budget was derived from the known structural and other deficiencies at the time and ongoing investigations may or may not reveal more defects to the Wharf that must be put right. Any such additional information will be made available once it has been verified and clearly quantified.

The Minister reiterated that: “We have made good progress on the northern mooring dolphin over the past week, the majority of the lower 120ft pile lengths are now in and four of the extensions have been welded to make these 180 – 200ft in length.  This variance in length is because we have different lengths of cut-off pile from the earlier works that we are reusing and also the fact that the design pile lengths vary.  The structural modeling of the dolphins is complex and each pile acts differently depending on how the ship pushes or pulls on the wharf.”

He continued: "By the end of next week we should have most of the piles in the northern dolphin driven to toe level or deeper.  Generally we are aiming for 180 feet down which means that we are setting the piles in the volcanic rock below the Bermuda Stone deposits that can contain cave features even at great depth. Scheduling of the concrete pours in mid to late June is in progress."

The Minister wishes to make it clear that the project remains very much on track and that steady progress is being made towards that goal and this process has been accelerated by favourable weather conditions.

“The Norwegian Breakaway is safely docking at Heritage Wharf on a regular basis and we are continuing with the finishing works to the breasting dolphins and hope to have them clearly and fully fitted out for her next visit on June 5th.