JAKARTA, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia's Public Works and Housing Minister Basuki Hadimuljono ordered on Tuesday a halt against all transportation projects across the country following a construction mishap that injured 7 workers earlier in the day.
The latest construction mishap occurred around 3:00 a.m. local time on Tuesday at a toll road project designed to link outskirt area of Bekasi to capital city Jakarta. It added the national construction mishaps to 14 in the last two years, the minister said.
"All above-the-ground projects requiring heavy duty works, such as girder installations, in Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi LRT, toll road and bridge constructions, must be temporarily stopped until further notice," the minister said in Yogyakarta to response the latest construction mishap.
The minister said the moratorium on those public projects was aimed at giving ample time for national Construction Safety Commission to evaluate all of those projects.
"After the evaluation process was completed, the order to resume the projects or not would be from me," he pointed out.
Besides the evaluation, the moratorium was also intended to assure compliance of the existing construction standards and mechanism by contractors carrying out the projects, the minister said.
Construction mishaps across Indonesia have claimed the lives of several workers and injured several others during the period.
Part of the mishaps occurred in infrastructure projects designated to facilitate the 2018 Asian Games sports event slated to be held in Jakarta and South Sumatra capital of Palembang in the next several months.
Indonesia is now intensifying infrastructure projects across the country aimed at improving the nation's connectivity, highly expected to help the nation in pursuing higher economy growth in the future.
Responding to the moratorium on national infrastructure construction projects, Indonesian President Joko Widodo supported it, saying that more detailed supervisory efforts and better management control to monitor those projects were essential to deliver high quality constructions for the people.
"Whatever the projects are, be it in normal or the accelerated ones, they require pertinent and more detailed supervisory tasks," the president said later in the day.
Indonesian Consumers Foundation (YLKI) strongly reacted against the construction failures, urging the government to carry out an engineering forensic investigation to find out the exact phase that leads to the failures.
YLKI Executive Tulus Abadi said on Tuesday that the failures may occur in the construction planning, construction works or in the supervisory task.
