Gail Alexan­der

Se­nior Po­lit­i­cal Re­porter

Work on the air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem and is­sues with the ceil­ing mould­ings in the Par­lia­ment’s North Cham­ber in the Red House in Port-of-Spain are all com­plet­ed and the cham­ber is ready for oc­cu­pa­tion, Ude­CoTT of­fi­cials have con­firmed.

The cham­ber was closed since last No­vem­ber af­ter ma­te­r­i­al - dec­o­ra­tive mould­ings - dis­lodged from the ceil­ing due to air con­di­tion­ing con­den­sa­tion is­sues. Ude­CoTT had stat­ed then that the mould­ing be­came dis­lodged due to a com­bi­na­tion of the age of the ceil­ing and con­den­sa­tion caused by the air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem lo­cat­ed in the at­tic of that cham­ber.

The mould­ing is part of the in­tri­cate art­work and pat­terns on the ceil­ing of both cham­bers in the Red House.

Af­ter the is­sue, House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives sit­tings were shift­ed from the North Cham­ber to the Sen­ate’s South cham­ber, where they con­tin­ued up to ear­ly Ju­ly when the Par­lia­ment went on re­cess. The re­cess is still on.

Re­pairs were ex­pect­ed to be com­plet­ed last year but con­tin­ued in­to this year due to nu­mer­ous ship­ping de­lays of the de­liv­ery of AC ma­te­r­i­al. Ude­Cott had to resched­ule crit­i­cal items of work and “de­ter key de­liv­er­ables”, Gov­ern­ment stat­ed in May.

On com­ple­tion of work soon af­ter that, the Cham­ber was deep cleaned in Ju­ly by crews.

Work done in­clud­ed re­mov­ing de­fec­tive duct­ing in­su­la­tion in all ar­eas, in­spec­tions by the de­sign con­sul­tant to de­ter­mine the ex­tent of re­pairs re­quired for the ex­posed duct­work, re­pairs to all duct­work branch­es, in­stal­la­tion of ad­di­tion­al sup­port to the duct­work and test­ing of re­paired duct­work.

Of­fi­cials said the en­tire AC duct­work was re­done. Al­so, all the mould­ings of the ceil­ing have been an­chored so there is no pos­si­bil­i­ty of the mould­ings be­com­ing de­tached from the ceil­ing in fu­ture.

Struc­tur­al as­sess­ment and test­ing was car­ried out by Besson En­gi­neer­ing.

Last No­vem­ber, Ude­CoTT had said the cost for the re­pairs of the mould­ing was nil, since the re­pair was be­ing treat­ed un­der “de­fects li­a­bil­i­ty.” They’d ex­plained that this is de­fined as “any is­sues that arise af­ter con­struc­tion is com­plet­ed.”

The Red House was re­opened in Jan­u­ary 2021 af­ter a $441 mil­lion ren­o­va­tion job.