ALMOST two years on, the homeless victims of Hurricane Ivan are still waiting for the promised replacement shelter, but last week head reconstructionist Danville Walker said the first set of houses would be handed over by month-end.

“It has been a struggle,” said Walker, chief executive officer for the Office of National Reconstruction (ONR), established as a temporary agency to manage the recovery from the September 2004 category four storm.

The process was initially to take six months, ending March 2005, with Walker seconded from his job as Director of Elections to manage it.

But the programme has been hit, at different times, by problems that included lack of funds, but most recently cement shortage and substandard cement that entered the market from Caribbean Cement Company, a monopoly producer.

“The cement shortage was probably one of the more difficult setbacks because we had to demolish four houses at Portland Cottage because of the bad cement,” said the ONR head.

“The cement company is suppose to be assessing them to reimburse us.”

After Ivan’s passage, a number of international agencies and local companies rallied to Jamaica’s assistance offering money and technical assistance. Not all the local pledges have materialised.

The ONR, with the assistance of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), is building 93 houses at Rocky Point and Portland Cottage in Clarendon; and another 114 at other points on the island that it tackled on its own.

Venezuelan soldiers have built 25 houses in Brighton, Westmoreland, and are working on another 75 at Burkesfield in Old Harbour, St Catherine.

The houses are not free. Walker says recipients will pay a small fee.

That fee for the first batch to be handed over in Brighton amounts to some $300,000 per unit.

All the structures are being built with sewage solutions, an improvement on conditions that existed before the hurricane.

The cement shortage forced the Venezuelans who initially purchased cement for the project from Carib Cement, to source the commodity from their homeland.

“… We just can’t get enough cement (locally) to keep the process going,” Walker said. Venezuela will also be boosting its corps of soldiers, from 72 to 142, to speed up the construction of the houses.

In Brighton, the problem is not cement, but water supply from the state-run National Water Commission.

“Those houses have been completed for some time now,” said Walker. It is just the water, so we are going to take a different approach; we are going to give them black tanks instead,” he said.

That section of Westmoreland is without piped water supply, so it would have been difficult, said the ONR head, for the state agency to bring water to Brighton only, bypassing all the other communities.

Twenty of the houses at Rocky Point are being finalised, while the houses in Burkesfield are due for completion by the first week in July, more than a month into the new hurricane season.

The plan is for the ONR to be deconstructed that same month.

“We are hoping to wrap up the ONR in July, but it depends on the cement,” said Walker.

Initially, after four months assessing the damage, the ONR in its early months, concentrated on improvement to infrastructure laid to waste by the hurricane: cutting roadways, running piped water and electricity to serve the homes to be built.

“We decided that what we create communities that if a hurricane came back to that particular area, if no other houses survived it, these houses would,” he said.

Some of the delay was also linked to the compulsory acquisition of lands.

The ONR’s work programme also included school renovations on which it is spending $900 million.

A total of 310 contracts were issued for 300 schools, with the repairs now only 65 per cent complete.

Walker says that segment of the programme was also delayed by cement shortage, but says the repairs should be finalised this month.

“We have a wall in Frome that we can’t start until we get the adequate cement supplies,” he said. “But we were well into the programme before the cement shortage hit.” Frome is located in Westmoreland.

The more pressing issue, however, are the houses.

The Venezuelan built structures will have two rooms, as will those spearheaded singly by the ONR; but the USAID/ONR houses are one-room structures.

davidsont@jamaicaobserver.com