Gail Alexan­der

The North­ern and South­ern Na­tion­al Acad­e­mies for the Per­form­ing Arts are al­most "falling down."Both cul­tur­al in­sti­tutes are in a state of de­te­ri­o­ra­tion re­quir­ing re­pairs, says Arts Min­is­ter Lin­coln Dou­glas, who says this is due to low grade in­fe­ri­or ma­te­ri­als and bad work­man­ship in­volved in the orig­i­nal con­struc­tion.Var­i­ous items need­ed to be re­placed have to be sourced from Chi­na, three months away in terms of or­der­ing and ship­ping, and there­fore light bulbs, for in­stance, take three months to change.

Dou­glas de­tailed the sit­u­a­tion in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day but ran out of the al­lo­cat­ed re­ply time since the num­ber of is­sues af­fect­ing the in­sti­tu­tions was so long.He said he was hold­ing one list of 19 is­sues con­cern­ing Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do, on which a more com­plete analy­sis had been done, had over 300 prob­lems.

Dou­glas said cer­tain re­pairs for the Port-of-Spain fa­cil­i­ty have cost $20 mil­lion so far and it would cost al­most $100 mil­lion to make it func­tion­al. The min­istry has not start­ed deal­ing with San Fer­nan­do fa­cil­i­ty yet, he added. The min­is­ter said the con­trac­tor who built the fa­cil­i­ty in Port-of-Spain was Shang­hai Con­struc­tion, and added: "NA­PA is show­ing some signs of de­te­ri­o­ra­tion, in some cas­es, sig­nif­i­cant signs of this.

"Tiles are falling off the build­ing, plumb­ing is fail­ing due to in­fe­ri­or grade san­i­tary ware and fit­tings, the foun­tain is fail­ing in terms of de­sign and fil­tra­tion sys­tems. The mov­ing stage shows ma­jor de­fects and con­tin­ues to be a big prob­lem. It isn't func­tion­ing now."He said leaks were ap­pear­ing along the steel pipes, in­di­cat­ing a break­down of pipes on the as­sump­tion in­fe­ri­or pipes were used by the con­trac­tor.

He added: "Valve con­trols are not work­ing and it is im­pos­si­ble to shut off the wa­ter. In some cas­es, all valves have to be re­placed. Doors, which are of in­fe­ri­or qual­i­ty, are al­so de­te­ri­o­rat­ing."Nu­mer­ous light bulbs have blown and it takes ap­prox­i­mate­ly three months to get the bulbs as they have to be im­port­ed from Chi­na. We sug­gest they be re­placed with some kind that is more ac­ces­si­ble."Elec­tri­cal volt­age is be­low what is re­quired and a thor­ough in­spec­tion and up­grade of the sys­tem is need­ed.

"The 'chill wa­ter' air-con­di­tion­ing unit has al­so de­te­ri­o­rat­ed and needs ur­gent re­pairs."Dou­glas said it might be ar­gued that was due to lack of main­te­nance "but tech­ni­cians have in­di­cat­ed this is an in­fe­ri­or sys­tem and may have to be re­placed."Ex­ter­nal glaz­ing and glass pan­els have cracked and a few have fall­en off, most re­lat­ed to man­u­fac­tur­ing faults, he added. "These al­so have to be im­port­ed from Chi­na." he said.Dou­glas said there was an agree­ment with the orig­i­nal con­trac­tor over a pe­ri­od and that had ex­pired.

"We are still go­ing though the list of things that are wrong with that build­ing be­fore we can even be­gin to ad­dress the re­pairs of the build­ing. It's sig­nif­i­cant," he added.Speak­ing to re­porters af­ter, Dou­glas said: "Both build­ings have been left with a sig­nif­i­cant amount of bad work­man­ship. Some of the func­tion­al prob­lems are in­con­sis­ten­cies. Both NA­PA and South­ern NA­PA stairs have dif­fer­ent heights and any­one can fall."

Dou­glas said the over­all NA­PA build­ings were func­tion­al but from an op­er­a­tions stand­point for the arts, it was a prob­lem.He said the front and two oth­er seg­ments of NA­PAs walls were cleaned, though that was a del­i­cate, dif­fi­cult process. Clean­ing of the glass pan­els was al­so cost-sig­nif­i­cant due to pol­ish­ing re­quired, he added.Dou­glas said Shang­hai Con­struc­tion was sup­posed to do main­te­nance for a pe­ri­od and that ex­pired.

He said there was al­so a con­tract with the com­pa­ny but that al­so end­ed and there was a small trans­fer of skills but no re­al train­ing in how to run the build­ing.He said NA­PA was closed from De­cem­ber to March to fix var­i­ous is­sues. He said the min­istry would be deal­ing with get­ting fund­ing for re­pairs for both."We are do­ing a com­pre­hen­sive analy­sis of both to see what is need­ed to bring them up to full func­tion­al stan­dards," he added.

Dou­glas agreed that would be learn­ing ex­pe­ri­ence for T&T, es­pe­cial­ly with the Cou­va Chil­dren's Hos­pi­tal be­ing built by Chi­nese ex­per­tise.