Five industrial estates to be sites of prefab work, says minister

The first of five state-owned industrial estate factory shells will be ready within the next four days in which repairs will start on the scores of houses destroyed by Hurricane Elsa, Minister of Housing Dr William Duguid said Monday night.

After a meeting of the newly-established Storm Repairs Committee, Dr Duguid told Barbados TODAY that the buildings of the Barbados Industrial Development Corporation (BIDC) will be used as workshops for prefabrication of the houses.

He said: “We pre-cut…transport in bundles and assemble them on-site and that would cut the time significantly to be able to get them up and running.

“We are getting some buildings from the BIDC so we could put five workshops in place so we can start preparing the cuts and then have houses ready to be assembled as we get locations and reassemble houses.”

The housing minister said locations would be allotted to the Urban Development Commission (UDC), Rural Development Commission (RDC) and the National Housing Corporation (NHC).

“Some are geographically governed and others are not, so we are trying to be reasonable in apportioning the work and not have one agency taking a lot and another agency not taking as much so we get as many people working as quickly as possible and divide up the work,” the Minister of Housing told Barbados TODAY.

While touring the NHC’s Rosemont housing area in St Michael Dr Duguid told reporters that more than 250 NHC units had leaks and other problems with their roofs.

“We have already completed 14 blocks in Deacons,” he said. “We are now working here in Rosemont to get as many of them repaired as quickly as we can.”

A further 95 houses that have collapsed are receiving priority treatment, he said.

Contractors were now being assigned and the sites cleared as Government pushes to have those houses finished as soon as possible for people to occupy, he added.

Dr Duguid said: “You would appreciate that this is a big task with over 1,200 reports, 900 houses that have roof problems and many that are collapsed…and we have to prioritise…and every day more and more reports are coming in…and we are on the ground getting as much done as we can.”

As hurricane-resistant house building returned as a major talking point, the housing minister announced a new policy to boost the hurricane resilience of the nation’s houses.

He said: “I will shortly be coming to the country with a programme with hurricane straps. We are going to call it ‘Operation Straps’ or ‘Operation Strap It’ where we will be offering members of the public hurricane straps to be able to retrofit them to their roofs.”

Dr Duguid said he favours the four-sided hip roof and in some cases retrofitting of homes as another solution.  He said a lot of design work can be done in the building of roofs, but suggested that mitigation is an option where additions can be made to the roofs after they have been completed.  (emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb)