Another month to complete Woodford Square fountain

Restoration of to the Woodford Square fountain will be completed within another month said mayor of Port of Spain Joel Martinez.

Speaking with Newsday on Thursday, Martinez said the project had to be postponed because of a lack of funding.

Martinez said the project was originally earmarked for completion earlier this year.

He said the statue of the Greek goddess of love, with her son Eros had been completed and was waiting to be reinstalled in the fountain.

"The work recently resumed and more funding was allocated to complete the project. The contractors are mobilising now to restart the project from what I understand from Mr Milton Duque.

"The public could look forward to the re-installation of the statue within two weeks, but I would say, for safety, another month. Sometimes there might be some challenges we don’t know might pop up and there may be additional work to be done.”

Martinez said there were also some challenges with the base of the fountain which prolonged the work.

He said while he did not not have the full cost of the project, it was less than $100,000.

"One of the major challenges of the project, the contractors had to re-channel water which kept settling in the middle of the base because it affected the integrity of the fountain system.The contractors had to try to direct the water in a different part of the fountain.

"They have been working on it and if you look at the fountain you would realise some serious work has been done on it. The statue itself has been worked on and it is ready to be erected."

Martinez said the contractors did not want to work on the inside of the fountain until they rectified the issues on the outside.

He said while the original plan was to fix the pump in the fountain and restore the statue, contractors encountered other leakages in the base which needed to be addressed.

"More or less everything is almost ready. There will also be lights in the fountain which will light up the square especially at nights. We are hoping that when the Red House is open the statue will be in place and the fountain will be up and running to attract more visitors to the park."

Artist Milton Duque said work on the base of the fountain had already resumed and citizens would soon see some more changes on the fountain in the coming weeks.

Duque said, this week, there will be work taking place on the base of the fountain in the square.

"There was nothing we could have done because we had to wait to get more materials to complete the work. Hopefully, in the coming weeks everything will be in place and the fountain will be up and working once again."

When Newsday visited the fountain the base for the statue was wrapped and tapped up in blue and black tarpaulin, while the base of the fountain was not painted and parts of the outside were missing.