Since 2020, the pandemic has taken a toll on nearly all public works underway in Macau. While some projects experienced delays of only a few weeks, others, like the construction of the Coloane prison, faced interruptions of up to 175 working days.
Macau Business | March 2024 | Special Report | Public works
The Public Works Bureau (DSOP in its Portuguese acronym) innovated in providing information regarding the impact of the pandemic on works underway in the first quarter of 2020: it began to count the working days of stoppage and indicate these values.
On the DSOP website, there has been a statement since July of that year (never updated): “Due to the impact of pneumonia from the new type of coronavirus, there are different levels of delays in this Office’s public works, namely delays related to transport problems and delivery of materials and with the return outside the initially scheduled time of workers who, due to the pandemic, were prevented from returning.”
“This Office will continuously monitor the development of the situation and will disclose in a timely manner possible impacts on works due to the evolution of the pandemic.” However, Macau Business was unable to grasp the meaning of this sentence, as DSOP failed to reply to requests for information.
What is known is that in July 2020, DSOP reported that there were 16 major works affected by the pandemic, with the biggest delay, 92 days, relating to the construction contract for social housing in Mong-Ha and the reconstruction of the Pavilion Mong-Ha Sports. But here, as in other cases, in addition to the impact of the pandemic, the government points to project reviews as another reason for the delays.
This list does not include the construction of the new prison in Coloane, which has experienced a 10-year delay and which, according to information released by DSOP, would take 175 working days due to the impact of Covid-19, which took a year ago, with the third phase contractor asking for an extension of the completion deadline.
In this list of 16 major works, the minimum delay was 12 days, for a public building in the Outer Harbor Landfill Zone.
One of the questions that Macau Business wanted to know is whether any of these 16 delays had been recovered, partially or completely. DSOP did not update the information after July 2020.
Even so, it is known, for example, that the construction of the 4th bridge is 43 days late due to the pandemic, in addition to other reasons, which are dictating the delay in completion.
As DSOP has an updated list of works completed since March 2019, worth more than MOP100 million, online, it is possible to see that only one was completed before the deadline and that seven met the expected deadline. There are still six that register delays of less than 2 percent. The other 40 have longer delays.
As the list includes 15 works that were completed before the pandemic arrived, it is possible to isolate the remaining 39 and realize that of the seven that met the deadlines, five were after March 2020, which allows us to deduce that the consequences of the pandemic were not felt in the same way in all the public works that were taking place in Macau at that time.
But analysing the moment in which each of these works was completed, it is also clear that the last one to finish within the deadline (the foundations and basements of economic housing in one of the lots in Zone A) was in March 2022. Since then, the 15 works which have been completed in the meantime have always experienced delays.
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