Construction resumes on Westmoreland police stations
Published:Monday | February 13, 2023 | 12:52 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
Construction works have resumed on two separate two-storey buildings, valued at approximately $350 million, to house the Little London and Frome police stations in Westmoreland.
The disclosure was made last week by Dr Horace Chang, the minister of national security.
Last October, Senior Superintendent Wayne Josephs, head of the Westmoreland Police Division, told councillors in the Westmoreland Municipal Corporation that waterlog woes had surfaced at the construction site in Little London and that it was being handled at the highest level.
Five months later, Chang informed The Gleaner that those challenges have been resolved and construction has since resumed.
“They are back on track,” he said during a tour of the Morgan Bridge Police Station last Friday.
The works are part of the Government’s drive to rehabilitate old and dilapidated police stations in the parish and across the island.
“They had some heavy rains at some point and some review of the engineering designs was done. Frome was really a destruction because it was on a slope,” Chang said of the challenges that led to the initial work stoppage.
The new police facilities, which are being built in collaboration with the National Housing Trust under the Ministry of National Security’s Project Rebuild, Overhaul, and Construct initiative, are aimed at modernising and making police stations citizen-friendly with better work spaces.
Works for the Little London building started in August and were scheduled to be completed in approximately two years.
At Frome, similar activities preceded the formal groundbreaking ceremony that was held in October 2022, with a construction timeline of 30 months.