The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) has approved the catch-up plan to fast-track the PHP759 million Tacloban Airport passenger terminal building construction to ensure its completion by next year, an official of the Eastern Visayas Regional Development Council (RDC) said. Meylene Rosales, regional director of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and vice chairperson of the E. Visayas RDC, said the negative slippage has been reduced to only negative one percent as of September and they are upbeat to see the project completion by March 2024. 'There is already an approved catch-up plan by CAAP main office. The negative slippage went down since there are deducted scope of work. There are activities under Phase 1 that are not needed. They would be better be part of phase 2,' Rosales said in a press briefing on Thursday. Earlier, the RDC project monitoring committee received reports of 38 percent negative slippage of the airport, prompting the body to make the project a top priority for monitoring. In a July 2023 report obtained by the Philippine News Agency (PNA), the CAAP said the delay was caused by an insufficient quantity of construction materials prompting the contractor to reduce its manpower. The increase in daily planned accomplishments has also contributed to the delay, according to CAAP, an attached agency of the Department of Transportation (DOTr). CAAP proposed solutions that include maximizing the utilization of available materials to expedite concrete pourings and asking the contractor to deploy more workers. The project which began on Dec. 5, 2020, was supposed to be completed on May 29, 2022. Also attributing to the delay are the revisions in the passenger terminal building's roofing, arch finishes and access ramp plans, which were only approved on September 19. As of September 25, the terminal building is 57.13 percent complete, according to DOTr. Meanwhile, RDC private sector representative for multimedia communication Buenaventura Go-Soco, expressed doubt that the project will be completed by March 2024. 'Now, the contractor must be wondering how he can meet the March 31 deadline. Based on his catch-up plan, he must do much more than he has done in the past. Maybe even triple. That's very difficult for him to do." The government awarded the project to MAC Builders based in Ormoc City in a joint venture with ML Builders. The Daniel Z. Romualdez Airport in Tacloban is one of the country's busiest with 36 daily flights between Manila and Cebu. The airport in the regional capital was ranked as the country's 7th busiest in 2022 with 1,489,803 inbound and outbound passengers. Named after Daniel Z. Romualdez, former speaker of the House of Representatives, the airport serves as the main gateway from Manila and Cebu to Eastern Visayas.
Source: Philippines News Agency
