Berkeley subcontractors were left scrambling to find work for employees after this week?s sudden axing of ProActive which closed the site. Adlia Davy, of Scorpio masons and carpentry company, had about 17 people on the Berkeley site. He said: ?I am hustling here and there. I have had to lay off some workers. They closed down the school with no notice. Some of them understood, some of them were vexed.?

Anthony Pearman, of marble and granite installers Abtech has a staff of about 17 although many worked away from Berkeley. He said: ?I am scrambling to pick up bits and pieces where I can to sort these guys out.?

He said he didn?t blame ProActive for the mess and he said they had good intentions. ?This is a political hot potato. If you think about it rationally there were two companies which went bankrupt doing projects like this.?

He said Sea Land had been bailed out after problems building Westgate Correctional Facility while BermudaTech were brought down by doing Spice Valley but ProActive had walked away.

Other workers complained of long waits for steel to arrive. ?ProActive may not be a tight ship but we were doing a decent job up there,? said Mr. McLaughlin. He said only once were the workers not paid and that had been sorted out because of the good relationship with the union.

Steel worker Richard McLoughlin said there had been constant changes by the architects while some of their designs were unworkable in reality leading to weeks of delays waiting for Government to improve changes. He said a lot of the structures were put too close together in the designs. ?We would have to take down steel and put it back up because everything was revised.?

One worker said there had been more than 200 design changes. ?We almost took down half of an entire building down, D building, because of changes.?

He said there had been four engineers on the site, all of whom had quit.