New site for a public morgue on Orange Street. - Norman Grindley/Chief Photographer
The long wait for a new public morgue seems set to continue for some time. Six months after the National Contracts Commission approved the process for the awarding of the contract to construct the morgue, the document is yet to be inked and there is no clear indication that this will be done anytime soon.
Up to yesterday, 149 Orange Street where the morgue is to be sited was still an open lot being used as an unofficial car park and no one in Government seemed able to give a timeline for the work to begin.
Tank-Weld Metals, the selected contractor, was also in the dark about when the contract would be signed.
The Ministry of National Security had initially set a 12-month construction period with work expected to start in January 2009 and the facility up and running by year end.
Not yet Cabinet approved
But responding to questions from The Gleaner, the security ministry said the proposed contract had not yet received Cabinet approval, while the acquisition of equipment and planning approval were also outstanding.
Last week, government sources told The Gleaner that the contract had not yet left the Ministry of Finance which is to submit it to Cabinet for approval.
However, the sources noted that $100 million has been allocated in this year's Budget for the construction of the new morgue.
That is less than one-quarter of the initial projected cost of $425.6 million. That figure is expected to increase based on hikes in the price of materials and increased labour costs.
The country has been without a public morgue for more than 30 years, with a private company, Madden's funeral home, being contracted to store bodies on behalf of the State.
In the past, Madden's has been left with millions of dollars in unpaid bills but the company now says that has been addressed.
"The situation is much better now. There is an outstanding amount but it is being paid on a regular basis," Ferdinand Madden told The Gleaner.
But despite the work of Madden's, the storage and transportation of bodies are major problems for police investigators who have lost vital forensic evidence.
Dead men tell tales
"It is a myth that dead men tell no tales. The post-mortem is their last chance to talk and dead bodies have a whole heap of information. You really need to gather all the information you can and the forensic is needed to answer questions, such as is it suicide or murder," Yvonne McCalla Sobers, convenor of Families Against State Terrorism (FAST), told The Gleaner.
FAST has been among a number of civil groups which have spent several years campaigning for the speedy construction of a public morgue.
"The present system is worse than inadequate with bodies piled on bodies and cases where the bodies have started to decompose," McCalla-Sobers added.
The need for a public morgue was placed back on the front burner in 2007 after the international media bashed Jamaica in the aftermath of the death of cricket coach Bob Woolmer.
That pushed the then People's National Party (PNP) government to promise the immediate construction of a public morgue. That's a promise the Bruce Golding-led administration, which replaced the PNP in September 2007, has indicated that it will keep.
But this is not the first time that political administrations have expressed their commitment to a public morgue.
The Edward Seaga-led Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) government was well into plans to construct a new morgue when it was booted out of office in 1989, while the PNP allocated funds for the project in 2006 but only preliminary work was done.
"That is why I'm not interested in talk, I want to see action because the country deserves a proper morgue," McCalla-Sobers said.