FG stops work on Sagamu-Iperu road over poor job quality

• Minister says for the bridges the minimum, henceforth shall become 6.5

The federal government has directed that work should stop on the 12km Sagamu-Iperu Road by the Sagamu Interchange on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway over poor job quality.

The minister of works, Sen. Engr. David Umahi, gave the directive on Thursday during an inspection tour of road projects in Lagos and Ogun states.

The minister expressed displeasure at the quality and speed of work on the road, noting that the work was not been done to specification.

He gave a seven-day period to the contractor handling the project to remedy the situation and remove the stone base that is actually dust base.

Umahi also directed the contractor to bring in the right milling machine and the right mixture of the stone base and to speed up the work.

The minister disclosed that the contractor had all the ramps and retaining walls on some bridges and directed that work should start on those bridges.

He pointed out that some piers on some of the bridges had rusted rods, adding “That is very dangerous. Most of these works don’t have budgetary locations, but are urgency works. I am giving seven days, I am leaving behind the design head so that they can work till Sunday to come up with a comprehensive drawing and then costing, so that I can appeal to Mr President on the urgency of this project.

“This is very urgent. If any of them should collapse, it will take multi-billion Naira to get them reconstructed, but now it will take less to get them amended.”

The minister also inspected some bridges during the tour, noting that “ We checked the first five bridge in Lagos and Ogun states and we discovered that we have a problem in as much as the standard headroom in bridge design 5.6, we have some bridges that are up to 6.2 and the least we had was the one that was up to 5.4 but we have the beams that are being hit by vehicles and that is very dangerous, so out of the bridges we inspected our directive is that we are going to descend the carriage way, dig up to one meter and reconstruct the carriage way. We have the technical way to do that.”

The minister affirmed that for the bridges the minimum, henceforth shall become 6.5, adding that he has already told Hitech and want the Head of Bridge design to incorporate this.

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