The contractor in charge of rebuilding Cambodia’s national railway has
been cutting corners on the health and safety of its workers, according
to a report published yesterday by the Asian Development Bank.
TSO-AS & Nawarath, a French-Thai joint venture, was reportedly
found to have grossly violated health and safety requirements at
workers’ camps along both the northern and southern rail lines.
The
report details, among other infractions, the deep pits and quarries
left behind by TSO
workers as they dig soil and stone for use in other areas of a
construction site.
Those pits along the section of the project
located between Sisophan and Poipet, “were very dangerous … especially
to children, [who] can fall into the pit and die”, the report states.
The
pits had steep slopes, to a depth of more than four metres, according
to the report, and yet TSO had made no attempt to take preventative
measures.
Safety scandals
In
late 2010, two children – a brother and sister aged 9 and 13
respectively – drowned while fetching water from a pond on a Battambang
resettlement site for families who previously lived along the railway,
according to media reports.
The Cambodian government-sanctioned
site was reported to be without fresh running water.
Japanese
engineering firm Nippon Koei Co Ltd, the
supervising consultant hired by the Cambodian government to oversee the
rehabilitation project, conducted its investigation in December after
TSO-AS & Nawarath failed to submit a monthly environmental report in
November.
The report was filed to the Ministry of Public Works
and Transportation and the ADB early this year.
The allegations
against TSO come amid scandal over the Kingdom’s national railway.
Questioning transparency
Australian
logistics firm Toll Group, which
holds a 30-year operational lease for the rail with Royal Group of
Companies, last week informed the Cambodian government of its intention
to suspend service as a result of significant delays in TSO’s
reconstruction, the
Post reported.
Site monitors found that the southern line
between Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville port was 51.9 per cent complete as
of December.
The northern line, which is broken into two
sections, was only 3 per cent complete from Phnom Penh to Sisophon and
35.4 per cent complete from Sisophon to Poipet, on the Thai border.
Insiders
have said that contractual issues between TSO and the Cambodian
government have been a main reason for the delays.
TSO country
head for Cambodia Claude Petit, however, when reached early yesterday by
phone shrugged off that speculation.
“In a project, there are
always contractual issues,” he said. “I won’t say anything on that.”
Petit
also rejected claims that the delays were out of proportion with what
he said was a complex project, claiming there were “a lot of reasons”
for the broken deadlines.
He declined to offer specifics of
those reasons, however, saying only “it seems to be a problem for Toll”.
When
asked if Toll’s withdrawal as a result of the setbacks would prompt the
project’s partners to call into question the integrity of TSO’s work,
Petit said “let them do it”.
Petit could not be reached
yesterday evening for comment on the Nippon Koei report.
Illuminating hazards
Nippon
Koei’s report highlights a number of health and safety hazards present
at TSO’s sites, namely insufficient sanitation facilities for workers
and a lack of protective equipment.
The “Kampot station [has an]
existing toilet in [an] old building, but TSO did not allow the workers
to use it, the [wash closet] in station building was locked,” the report
states.
TSO does not provide clean water to many of the camps,
and workers either have to buy their own clean water for bathing and
drinking, or use the unsanitary water sources available to them, the
monitoring team found during their December inspections.
The
report states that workers along the southern line had not been provided
with safety gloves or masks, but also infrequently wore the safety
helmets and boots they had been issued to them.
Philip Bulmer,
Nippon Koei deputy project manager for the southern line, declined to
answer questions yesterday on what he said was a “confidential” report.
ADB
officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
No comments:
Post a Comment