But is it safe for use?

All this refers to the National Academy of the Performing Arts, a billion dollar structure designed and built by Shanghai Construction Group without competitive tenders. The Urban Development Company of Trinidad & Tobago (Udecott) was the government agency which invited the tender, approved the designs and which had the oversee brief to ensure that citizens of the country received value for the money and would have a usable and safe building in which to teach and develop the cultural arts of our people. It was meant to be the flagship building for our culture.

But things went terribly wrong and our flagship foundered upon the rocks of inadequate design parameters and appalling levels of workmanship. So who, within Udecott, under Calder Hart’s rule, or within Town & Country Planning Division, knew what was really going on with this grand project? Apparently no one? I am certain that Calder Hart, for all the wrongs and scandals he foisted upon us, did not know that the workmanship in almost every trade would have been condemned as faulty, inadequate and grossly unsafe. If he did, criminal charges should be considered, as indeed should be considered against the design build contractor—Shanghai Construction Group.

No local construction team or entity would ever have been allowed to design, and purport to build, such an under designed and shoddy structure. Indeed, thankfully, none of us would ever try to be that incompetent and recklessly unsafe.

Last week, I told you that the standard seismic category and the wind load requirements for buildings in Trinidad and Tobago were not met. The designs would have been rejected by any competent authority, but only if they had seen these designs. Everything remained secret, and probably is still secret as we shall see.

But the fears which saw the closure, for secret reasons, of NA PA for about two years, should not apply only to NA PA. Shanghai Construction also designed and built, again without competitive tender, or any construction oversight, the Prime Minister’s Residence and Diplomatic Centre. To what seismic standard and wind loading was that designed and built? Does anyone consider this? NA PA began to fail structurally and had to be evacuated.

Might failures be spreading within our Diplomatic Centre as we write? And this is not farfetched at all, given what highly skilled engineers and internationally recognized testing agencies reported following their examinations at NA PA.

And let no one presume that what the experts found were incidents of improper work here and there. What was revealed, both visually and by non-destructive testing, was a consistency of abjectly poor workmanship and methods, throughout the building. Literally scores of photographs show welds on structural components which are below backyard ticky-tack standards, and certainly have no place in a sophisticated structure such as this purports to be.

But all of those serious and dangerous faults have now been remedied, according to Udecott’s announcement. NA PA is Ready! But is it really safe? What had been done to upgrade the building to meet the legal structural requirements for seismic and wind load safety? Does the structure now meet these requirements. The notice claims that full design reviews were done, and that corrective and remedial works were completed to all of the 5,000 plus condemned welds left there by Shanghai, and additional bolts were installed and “any defective reinforced concrete” was remedied.

We cannot challenge Udecott on these statements without further examinations and tests. But all this raises the question: Why was the building so shoddily and dangerously constructed? Other questions remain. Why is Shanghai still operating here with this record of failure (all welds tested failed!)? And why did two political parties and their lackeys conspire to keep all of this so secret? One would think that the UNC would have seen great value in exposing the failures of Manning and Hart in this, but they never did. They kept it all secret for reasons that are still undisclosed.

These questions need to be answered, but not necessarily by another commission of inquiry.

It is fitting to note that the Report of the Las Alturas Commission was handed to the President on Wednesday. Will we ever get to know what is in that report, an inquiry into how and why another major Udecott project literally began to collapse upon itself.

But Section 34 is a wide blanket, and it will cover, unless we remove it, the reasons why both the PNM and the UNC need to keep NA PA a secret.