Road Repairs Under REACH to Continue Through March

Road repairs under the Relief Emergency Assistance and Community Help (REACH) programme are ongoing and will continue through March of next year.

Minister without Portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, Hon. Robert Morgan, provided an update on the $3-billion road rehabilitation initiative during Wednesday’s (October 30) post-Cabinet press briefing at Jamaica House.

“Road repairs under the REACH programme go on until March – that’s the patching aspect… so, we will be doing road rehabilitation from now all the way into March,” he said.

The REACH programme addresses the need for critical road repairs following the passage of Hurricane Beryl on July 3.

Addressing concerns about the pace of patching, Minister Morgan said that every measure is being taken to ensure a thorough and diligent progress.

“The Prime Minister would have announced it in September but due to the consistent rains, we were not able to escalate the patching. I think… we lost [about] 60 to 80 tonnes of asphalt due to rain, where contractors would have gone out with a truckload of asphalt to do patching and the rains came down… . So, we had to make decisions during the period to pause the patching,” he pointed out.

“I know that there are members of the public, justifiably so, who are a bit concerned about the patching not moving as fast as they would like it to, but we have to ensure that it is done properly so that… the patched roads do not become destroyed too quickly,” he noted.

Meanwhile, Minister Morgan said that the clean-up component of REACH is approximately 82 per cent complete.

“We would have allocated about $1.5 billion dollars to the National Solid Waste Management Authority (NWSMA) as well as National Works Agency (NWA) to carry out cleaning and some rehabilitation works in various communities. It’s about 82 per cent complete in terms of the clean-up aspect. We would have focused on vector control; particularly in areas of Portmore where you have earth drains, we would have focused on cleaning those to reduce the mosquito population,” Minister Morgan said.