ACEH COAST ROAD - STATUS REPORT

Ron Oats is Head of Logistics for OBI in Aceh and he has spent the past weeks trying to get building materials into the Calang - Lho Kruet area so that housing construction can start.

I asked him about the new West coast road and Ron has just mailed back:

"The roads between Lamno and Lhokruet and Lhokruet and Patek are drivable by four wheel drive vehicles and trucks on dry days but they are very very rugged. The Lhokruet to Patek road is especially difficult and unusable on rainy days. the bridge is out at Lamno and they have a small juryrig ferry that takes hours to wait your turn. I drove from from Banda Aceh to Meulaboh in a 4 WD on a good dry day. It took us 13 hours and we were exhausted. You can't haul the amount of stuff we need to build thousands of houses over that road now and it will be worse as we get into the really rainy season in late Aug/Sept. The condition of the road gets worse evey day and the TNI engineers have pulled out."

OBI are using a barge and tug to move cement and iron to the area.