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So how has the Hurricane Richard Rehabilitation Project fared off? Yesterday, Irvin Thimbrel, Ministry of Works Engineer gave an update on the progress made:

Irvin Thimbrel, Ministry of Works Engineer
"We have undertaking 173 projects which consist of repairs and building of new homes. We have completed so far 47 new homes, 50 repairs and 75% of the remaining are more than 80% complete so within this week and next week people will begin to move into their new homes. From the 50 new homes - 47 completed so far, most of those homes are occupied by the home owner. It is a pleasure to see somebody who was totally devastated by the hurricane gets a new sets of keys to move into their new homes. The size of the house we are building are 12 x 12 for the elderly - people who live by themselves we have 12 x 14, 14 x 16, 16 x 24 and 20 x 30. The new homes that we are building they are of wooden frames, the sill, the uprights, the roof, the partition , the siding are from plycem and the flooring is also plycem. The windows are white painted hurricane type metal windows and the doors are wooden panel doors. The foundations are pad type foundation with 8 inch piers. what we have dome is to anchor the sill to the concrete post, we've seal off the eaves just in case there is another hurricane, one of the weak point in your home would be an open eave, once the breeze gets under there and takes off one sheet of roofing - that's it your house is gone, it won't stand up and so we decide to seal all the eaves. We have put in place hurricane straps on the roof, we also put in proper anchorage of the roof. Sometimes I go to the sites and check and the contractors would see me looking up - I was just checking to see how many nail holes they had to make sure that the roofing is properly fix on to the laud boards."

Costing of the homes; 12 x 12 is around $12,500. 12 x 14 is $14,500. 14 x 16 is $16,500 and the 16 x 24 is approximately $19,500. Most of the homes we are building however are the 16 x 24 and the 14 x 16. The 14 x 16 is a bit tight, we try to replace what people had out there and sometimes we have to go a little bit over because really and truly what was there was inadequate for a family. A family of 5 or 6 in a one bedroom room, sometimes we have to make adjustments. We have two models of the 14 x 16 which is the tighter design; we have one where there is a passage that goes between the two rooms that allows you to enter into the bathroom which is place on top of the septic tank. The other design is that you go into one of the room and so just to be able to give people more we had to twist and bend the rooms a times.

The duration of construction: we really wanted the houses to be finish in two weeks; it should not take more than two weeks to finish one of the homes. The repairs sometimes are a little bit less. In case of the repairs, we see something that we need to repair roofing or siding but the moment we take away those things that are there you realize the job is bigger than you actually initially thought and so we have to extend what we do on the buildings. also initially we started to try to just do repairs to some of the buildings but we went out back there and we had to take the buildings down, a lot of them because they are not repairable. Looking at the structure of the homes, some of them had serious problem with decay; the structure was gone. Honestly I don't know how some of these houses were still standing."

The Ministry of Works says that the finishing work will continue to close off the project completely.