The Bahamas Electricity Corporation (BEC) will eventually have to dig up the roads that were recently constructed and paved as part of the New Providence Road Improvement Project (NPRIP) if it has to do maintenance or expansion work, BEC's press officer Arnette Ingraham told The Nassau Guardian.

Ingraham explained that provisions were not put in place in some of the newly-constructed roads for BEC to be able to maintain or expand its network without digging up the streets. She said she could not say which roads those were and how soon the work might have to be done.

"In the corporation's opinion the New Providence Road Improvement Project has made insufficient provisions for some of the utilities that will allow for easy access in instances where there is need for further expansion or to carry out repairs," Ingraham said.

"Therefore, there are several roads that have recently been redesigned or paved where BEC and other utilities will have to open up the road in order to access our supplies."

However, press officer for the Ministry of Public Works Shenique Albury said all of the utility companies submitted plans for their underground networks that should have told the road contractors what to install for the future expansion of their networks and where to install it.

"We sent a request to all companies in the planning phases in terms of their needs and projections," she said.

"We have been installing based on the information. We accommodated them and their needs and as far as we know what we are putting in is adequate."

Wilson contended that throughout the road build the contractors, Jose Cartellone Construcciones Civiles (JCCC), damaged BEC's pipes and ducts which resulted in outages.

BEC chairman Michael Moss told The Guardian recently that New Providence underwent several power outages due to underground lines being severed by road workers.

Speaking about the road project, Ingraham said, "It is our opinion that if it (the NPRIP) was handled differently it would have minimized (future) impact to the thoroughfares."
She said BEC has no timeline for the excavations, but insisted that "there are roads that will be dug up in the future."

The NPRIP has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks, especially by Progressive Liberal Party chairman Bradley Roberts, a former minister of works.

Roberts contends that the government has not effectively implemented a traffic management plan for the road construction and has created "utter chaos".

He suggested that the government has allowed JCCC to go about the NPRIP in a "wishy washy" way, calling their methods "terrorism" against New Providence road users.

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