In a statement issued yesterday, the FMS said that all doors supplied for the Mater Dei Hospital have been installed.

FMS pays for executed work and in the case of ‘doors’ the contractor is reimbursed his costs as and when the doors have been installed; as verified by the cost controllers through physical inspections on site.

There are no payments made on either the number of designed doors and/or on doors that have been ordered but not yet installed.

On completion of the project, there will be over 6,000 doors that would have been installed in the Mater Dei Hospital, out of which approximately 950 are fire-rated steel doors.

In the initial pre-construction designs submitted by Skanska Malta JV (SMJV) to the FMS in late 1999, provision was made for 464 fire doors, the target value of which was Lm112,700.

During the design process, on FMS’s insistence with the contractor that the design of the hospital had to conform to international fire-safety standards, there was no option but to increase the number of fire-doors from 464 to 967, and a contract was awarded for the value of Lm585,000.

This means that initially each door would have cost around Lm242, but the new estimate puts the value of each door at around Lm600.

FMS engineers have ensured that the design of the Mater Dei Hospital includes well-defined fire-zones and/or compartments, so that in case of an emergency, both patients as well as staff are adequately protected.

As a result the contractor was constrained to re-design the fire-zoning/compartments of the hospital, a process which, by necessity, led to the increase in the number of fire zones/compartments and which, in turn, led to the increase in the number of fire-doors which had to replace normal timber doors.

This and other similar instances, have contributed to the escalation of costs from the original target value given by Skanska Malta JV to the Maltese government.

As FMS has had the occasion to state previously, for the foregoing reasons and in the interest of proceeding with the project, FMS had decided to only effect payments to the contractor on a ‘without prejudice’ basis, pending final resolution of such discrepancies.