RUSH TO CRASH ,,,,, 21 crushed in flyover collapse

The Vivekananda Road flyover after Thursday afternoon’s cave-in that killed 21 people and injured 25.
A search was on late into the night for trapped survivors. Picture by Amit Datta

TT, Calcutta, March 31: A flyover under construction for seven years, which chief minister Mamata Banerjee had forced on the fast track last November, collapsed this afternoon, crushing at least 21 people and sending shockwaves through the city.

Twenty-five people were admitted to hospital with injuries and a search was on late into the night for any more survivors trapped in the rubble outside Ganesh Talkies in Burrabazar.

The flyover runs along Vivekananda Road heading west, with one arm swerving left towards Howrah bridge and another right towards Nimtala. On a 40-metre stretch on the Howrah-bound flank, casting between two piers had continued through last night until noon today. This stretch came crashing down shortly after noon, pulling down with it beams on the other flank and twisting pillars like ribbons in some places.

Mamata cancelled her election meetings in Jungle Mahal and rushed back to the city, promising action against the "guilty" and launching an attack on the Left Front under whose rule work on the flyover had begun.

But the chief minister's own rush to open the flyover came under the scanner as engineers suggested that haste to complete the project might have contributed to poor supervision or workmanship that caused the crash, flattening over a dozen trucks, cars and autos.

Last November, The Telegraph had reported that engineers working on the flyover - which had missed eight deadlines in six years - were flummoxed when Mamata announced at a Jagaddhatri Puja opening that it would be ready by February.

At that point, only 76 per cent of the work was complete. With just about six hours of work allowed in a day, between 11pm and 5am, the engineers had told this paper that there wasn't enough time to complete the project by February. As expected, the February deadline too passed and a new one was set for August.

A little after noon today, residents heard a rumbling sound and rushed out of home. "I thought it was an earthquake when my living room started shaking," said Amar Tiwari, who lives two buildings away on Kali Krishna Tagore Street. When he stepped out onto the pavement, he saw parts of the flyover coming down. "A chunk fell on a bus, then a stall and then the Posta police kiosk and the Kali temple... and then the whole area got covered in dust." A truck lay sliced by a metal beam.

Ashok Jain, a professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, who is familiar with Calcutta, said the congestion and traffic around the site coupled with an urgency to complete the project quickly may have contributed to pressure on the workmen and supervisors assigned the construction task.

"It would appear somebody forgot something," said Jain, who has over the past decade investigated six failures of various structures - bridges to transmission towers.

IVRCL, the Hyderabad-based company building the flyover, denied any quality or technical issues. "It's nothing but God's act," PTI quoted K. Panduranga Rao, group head, HR, as saying. Two IVRCL engineers are missing, he added.

But chairman and managing director E. Sudhir Reddy refused to comment and said: "We have to really see what went wrong." In the afternoon, the company's offices in Hyderabad and Calcutta were found locked.

A senior official of the Union urban development ministry said the Centre, which contributed funds for the project, had reservations about IVRCL from the start and had voiced these in a review meeting of the project. The company was later blacklisted by the railways and several states.

With elections due within days, a political slugfest erupted over the tragedy. "A blacklisted company shouldn't have got the project," Mamata said, passing the blame for the tragedy to the Left.

The Opposition, in turn, demanded the removal of state urban development minister Firhad Hakim who is in charge of the implementing agency, Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA).

For the CMDA, the second flyover crash in three years is a big loss of face. In March 2013, a portion of the Ultadanga flyover had collapsed into a canal. A former official of the CMDA said: "The contractor builds the flyover but it has to take into account the objections and advice of the supervisory agency."

Babul Supriyo, junior urban development minister at the Centre, said the ministry would review the flyover plan to see how it was approved by the UPA government in the first place. The Centre has partially funded the project.

A CMDA official who would not be named said the agency had considered removing IVRCL, but was not sure of finding a replacement when much of the work was done.

Engineers not associated with the project cited problems with the scaffolding and negligence as two likely factors for such a collapse. Since work had dragged on, the nuts and bolts may have become weak and could not take the weight of the concrete. It is possible no one checked the bolts, an engineer said.

Residents said several bolts came off the flyover around 10am and fell on vehicles on the road below. "Some of the workers were brought down around this time," said fruit trader Vivek Jain.

Another engineer with an infrastructure company said: "There are telltale signs when a scaffolding can't bear the weight of concrete, and basic monitoring can detect these. If the scaffolding can't hold on, then it will bend and nuts and bolts will come loose. One should immediately stop work and reinforce the scaffolding. But when in a hurry, such points can get ignored."