OCG Says contractor not on approved list at time of fatal Barbican incident

BY ALICIA DUNKLEY Senior staff reporter dunkleya@jamaicaobserver.com

Friday, November 19, 2010

THE OFFICE of the Contractor General (OCG) says Ronham and Associates Limited, the company which was laying pipes on behalf of the National Water Commission when two workers died last week, was not on the National Contracts Commission's (NCC) list of approved contractors at the time of the incident.

The two labourers — Orlando Bennett, 27, and Kirk Vernon, alias ‘Corner Stone’, died while laying sewer pipes for the National Water Commission in Barbican, St Andrew when mounds of dirt from a trench collapsed, trapping them below.

Yesterday, Contractor General Greg Christie told the Joint Select Committee examining the reports of public bodies that at the time of the incident the contractor was not on the approved list of the NCC.

“We will be releasing a report about a fatal accident that took place last week and we have already done a preliminary enquiry into that matter and that particular contractor was one of the contractors that we pulled. As at right now, that contractor is not registered,” Christie told the House committee.

According to Christie, when Ronham and Associates got the contract in 2008 they were registered then but the OCG has since “refused to go forward with their application”.

“…I don’t want to say anything more now but suffice to say that when they got the contract award they were registered, but when that accident happened they were not registered and the professional staff they asserted they had on staff they don’t have on staff,” Christie told the committee.

“We do not know why what happened on this work site happened last week. What we do know is that the engineer that they said they have on staff they don’t have on staff and what we do know is that that particular contractor is not now registered, albeit that they were registered at the time that they won the contract,” according to the contractor general.

Christie, at the same time, expressed concern about a recent Cabinet decision to introduce a three-month moratorium in the registration process so that contractors, whose applications are pending in a particular category, will still be able to, for example, bid on a contract in the interim.

“I can see a conflict of interest. I am not in agreement with this moratorium. I think it’s like an unbridled horse. We don’t know where it’s going to take us. I am very uncomfortable about it about the devil in the details,” the contractor general told the meeting.

He said while he did not know the specifics of the Cabinet decision, which is yet to be made public, incidents such as what happened last week would be what such a provision could foster.

“I am concerned that the executive is now talking about a moratorium which runs smack into what we are trying to do, which is trying to ensure probity and propriety which is my job, as mandated by law.

“Let’s say it’s the résumé for an engineer and the presence of that engineer is the difference between them being a grade one or two contractor, and through the moratorium you go ahead and register them as a grade one or two. You would have unleashed them on the public without knowing whether they should be there in the first place,” the contractor general explained.

“The contractor registration process, in as much as some people think it’s too cumbersome, is there for a purpose. It is there to ensure that a person who is permitted to bid on a Government contract at a particular level has been certified as having the technical competence, the financial capacity, the assets and the experience to do it so that you don’t have a school where the roof falls down on the children and kills them. It happened in Haiti, based on that report a lot of the hospitals and schools were destroyed because of corruption in construction contracts,” Christie said.

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OCG Says contractor not on approved list at time of fatal Barbican incident