NEW WAITAKI BRIDGE

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26493, 7 August 1951, Page 5

NEW WAITAKI BRIDGE

Sir,—lt is gratifying to read that a consultant civil engineer and a firm of contractors are willing to design and construct respectively this bridge over the Waitaki so urgently required for many years. The Minister of Works should be urged to accept this and similar offers and not continue to shelter behind the constantly reiterated phrase “shortage of engineering staff. It is well known in private engineering circles that the primary cause of the departmental problem is a failure to give individual responsibility to their engineers, so that instead of one engineer being completely responsible for, say, five jobs, five engineers are inefficiently in control of one job, thus creating artificial “shortages” and increasing the cost and time of important works. It is time the public was made aware of the false reasoning presented.—Yours, etc., CIVIL ENGINEER. July 21, 1951. [The Minister of Public Works (Mr W. S. Goosman), to whom this letter was referred said that his practice was to ignore anonymous letters or those written over a nom de plume. If the correspondent was prepared to furnish name and address he was prepared to reconsider the request.]