Tobago airport set to open earlier than expected

Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

The new ter­mi­nal at ANR Robin­son In­ter­na­tion­al Air­port ex­pan­sion project could be com­plet­ed soon­er than orig­i­nal­ly planned.

Al­though the ter­mi­nal was set to be ready by the end of the first quar­ter of 2025, Na­tion­al In­fra­struc­ture De­vel­op­ment Com­pa­ny Ltd (Nid­co) chair­man Her­bert George now be­lieves it could be fin­ished ear­li­er, pos­si­bly in the first part of that quar­ter.

The bil­lion-dol­lar project, con­struct­ed by Chi­na Rail­way Con­struc­tion, is be­ing man­aged by the Nid­co.

George has not com­mit­ted to a spe­cif­ic date but agrees that there is no­tice­able ad­vanced progress each week.

Dur­ing a vis­it to the con­struc­tion site yes­ter­day, Guardian Me­dia ob­served the larg­er of the two build­ings was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 95 per cent com­plet­ed, with work­ers seen han­dling small­er tasks on the near­ly com­plet­ed build­ing.

Out­side, land­scap­ing at the main en­trance is un­der­way, with a new­ly plant­ed round­about and near­ly com­plet­ed fenc­ing along the pa­ra­me­ters.

Ac­cord­ing to George, the project re­mains on bud­get and has faced no ma­jor set­backs.

“It’s not just a shell,” George said. He added, “All the equip­ment has to be in and com­mis­sioned, so you have work go­ing on with­in the ter­mi­nal you are look­ing at. Those are the works that are be­ing done now.

“We are work­ing to­wards hav­ing it done, hav­ing it com­plet­ed no lat­er than the first quar­ter.”

In Sep­tem­ber, the Prime Min­is­ter gave Par­lia­ment an up­date on the project. He not­ed that pay­ments to date to the main con­trac­tor to­tal US$65 mil­lion, not in­clud­ing land ac­qui­si­tion costs of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $300 mil­lion. There was an ini­tial de­lay to the project due to the COVID19 pan­dem­ic.

At the con­tract sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny for the air­port ex­pan­sion project in Jan­u­ary 2020, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert said a to­tal of $1.2 bil­lion would be spent on the con­struc­tion of a new air­port ter­mi­nal in To­ba­go, along with an up­grade of ex­ist­ing fa­cil­i­ties and the ac­qui­si­tion of land in Crown Point to com­plete the ex­pan­sion.

He said the new ter­mi­nal was ex­pect­ed to cost $870 mil­lion, while $36 mil­lion would be spent to up­grade the ex­ist­ing air­port ter­mi­nal. The Gov­ern­ment al­lo­cat­ed $300 mil­lion to ac­quire 53 acres of land be­tween Store Bay Lo­cal Road and the air­port perime­ter fence in the Bon Ac­cord area.

The air­port ex­pan­sion con­tract, which was ini­tial­ly ex­pect­ed to take two years to be com­plet­ed, four months for de­sign and 20 months for con­struc­tion. At the sign­ing cer­e­mo­ny, Im­bert said Chi­na Rail­way’s bid was the on­ly com­pli­ant bid at the end of the ten­der­ing process.