St Kitts and Nevis (WINN): Construction of the federation’s proposed second cruise pier is expected to begin in June.

That’s according to the Minister responsible for Transport, Ian Patches Liburd, who is projecting that the country will have a brand new pier by next year.

The minister says preparatory working expected to lead to construction has been ongoing.

“I have been on promotional tours with my colleague Lindsay Grant and a new cruise pier is a must. One of the things that we found is that when we looked at the designs, designs that we met there, they had a pier being designed for a 50 year cycle storm, one every 50 years and we had to change that because we now have 100 year cycle storms. So that meant redesigning, there’s also in terms of navigation an area to the east of the pier where it’s going to be built there was some embedded rock, so dependent on the weather some ships could not berth on the eastern portion of the dock and we thought that we should do some more dredging so that all ships, we could accommodate them here in St Kitts. So we have engaged our consultants in terms of getting us our information memorandum, the terms and conditions have been negotiated with the C.C.C and SCASPA, a technical team was here in St Kitts I think last week, our contract negotiation award is scheduled for early June and construction will start in early June and we anticipate that by 2018 our construction period of 382 days, we’ll have a brand new pier.”

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