Are we doomed to live with poor roads?
It is not altogether unexpected that with the heavy rainfall which was recently unleashed on us, courtesy of Nicole, there would be another round of public discussion on the poor state of our road network.
On Tuesday morning I heard Stephen Shaw, spokesman for the National Works Agency, trying on Nationwide to manoeuvre his way through explaining to us why our roads tended to end up in a badly damaged state after heavy rainfall.
Mr Shaw seemingly knew almost all of the factors actually working against us building good roads and effecting repairs which could hold up, but I waited in vain to hear him say that shoddy workmanship and substandard material were the main bugbears.
We have been told that road work to be done under the heading of JDIP will be strictly monitored to ensure that subcontractors work within the quality guidelines being insisted on. This is good news but for now, based on our recent history of poor road construction and especially repairs, all we have are the words.
Our local people, like A-list contractors YP Seaton, have done quite good work on road building and even the NWA and some of its other contractors have done highway construction that is of a fairly high standard. The real problem, it seems, is in the maintaining of our urban and arterial roadways. It is there I believe that good money is constantly being used to pay for shoddy work, year after year.
I assume that the NWA has set standards per road type and would ensure that those listed contractors who they use either regularly or intermittently, meet, at the very least, the nominal standards of the NWA.
In all of the discussion I did not hear one person factor in the huge increase in cars on our roads in the last 20 years. Are we building our roads to hold the same volume of vehicles that we had 25 and 30 years ago? When to that is added the fact that in many upscale hill communities, contractors openly break the law by driving heavy earth-clearing/moving equipment to the site instead of hauling them with soft-wheeled lowboys, even without heavy rainfall, our roads deteriorate fairly quickly.
As I understand it, the first substrate laid is stone, compressed, then second, marl, compressed. After that an inch and a half layer of asphaltic concrete is spread out on the top. If the top remains unbroken, the road remains in a reasonably good state. The “concrete” there does not imply cement as we know it.
If the marl beneath it (or any section) begins to shift, in time the asphalt surface will shift too, and with normal traffic, will eventually break. After weeks of traffic, a pothole will result. If it rains, the water will easily seep into the marl substrate and then additional wearing away will begin until it results in the huge pock-marked roadways that we have grown used to.
All of this is compounded by the poor state of our drainage and the natural tendency of water to seep into the dirt edges near to the verges until it lifts the asphalt. This is especially so with our roads in the hills.
Over 10 years ago I heard a conversation that Mutty Perkins had with an engineer on one of his radio programmes. The man suggested that if a 97:3 mixture of marl and cement was used as the second substrate, the tendency of the marl to shift would be significantly lessened. The assumption, as I understood it then, would be that the natural moisture in the marl would bring about a chemical bonding and hardening of the marl/cement mixture.
One imagines that that would necessitate the marl and that three per cent mix of Portland cement to be put together in a batching plant prior to removal to the site. Since that time I have never heard discussions along those lines and what we have at present is powdery, soft marl being used because it is cheap and in endless supply.
Maybe our road building gurus in government should just accept that the honest thing to do is tell our people that we really cannot afford the proper maintenance of our roads and we will have to live with potholes for the rest of this century. We do not want them to force themselves into making vote-catching promises like the one made by former PNP Transport and Works Minister Bobby Pickersgill when he promised us that Jamaica would be “pothole-free by 2003”.
Just the rhyme and the convenience of it in that slogan should have alerted us to the impossibility of it and the politics at play.
Electricity, phone, internet
During the time of the heavy rains when I was without electricity I assumed that once it returned so would my cable, my phone and my internet supply courtesy of Flow’s triple play.
Well, the electricity did come back, thanks to sustainable hard work by JPS. The cable returned but the phone and internet were dead. In fact, the modem seemed to be dead.
I am going to be driven back to LIME landline because when electricity goes so does the Flow phone service. Not so with LIME. As JPS tends to cut power to my community for short periods at least once per week, I am without phone service once that goes. In the present instance Flow told my lady that they would respond in “seven working days”.
Not good enough! This is 2010, not 1980. Were I foolish enough not to have any credit in my mobile phone I would not have been able to call Flow.
If Flow hopes to bring its entertainment and telecommunication packages to the entire island, it must employ a sufficient number of technical people to deal with the demands of after-sales service and problems which will arise.
How can it sell internet which by its very nature, implies speedy communication and information in a flash at one’s fingertips, yet when that system fails temporarily, it lapses into an archaic mode and crawls with “seven working days”? Maybe the company has over-extended itself.
Not good enough, Flow!
observemark@gmail.com