DMRC creates ‘cave-in’
Friday morning brought a sense of déjà vu for shopkeepers and residents of the Yusuf Sarai and Green Park areas, adjacent to Aurobindo Marg.
Friday morning brought a sense of déjà vu for shopkeepers and residents of the Yusuf Sarai and Green Park areas, adjacent to Aurobindo Marg.
Huge traffic jams and road diversions awaited them as the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) had dug open the stretch on the Aurobindo Road. The road was dug up to repair leaking pipelines under the road that had led to cracks on it.
This is roughly the eighth time since first week of July that the stretch between AIIMS and IIT crossing on the Aurobindo Marg experienced water logging and traffic snarls caused by damaged roads.
The problems of water logging and cave-ins have been acute this year after Metro officials filled up the road with earth.
Raj Kumar Sharma, president of the Yusuf Sarai Vyapar Mandal, said, “The road has caved in nearly eight times in last two months. They are doing a shoddy job.”
Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) engineers, who managed the road till 2006-07, claimed the road was caving in frequently due to “improper compacting” of the soil used for filling the portion between the road surface and top of the Metro’s underground line.
The Delhi Metro has replaced a huge underground barrel (large pipe carrying mix of sewage and storm water to the main drain) with five pipes under the road from across the point in front of Hotel Sartaj to a big manhole in front of the Hauz Khas Apartments.
This was connected to the main barrel on the east side and it emptied into the open drain called the Gautam Nagar nullah. Plus, there was a problem owing to an incorrect angle of a drain joining from north to this point.
“The water logging was due to large scale clogging at this point. The drain was never cleaned. The civic agency got it cleaned with a super sucker machine in July end. Since then there has been no problem," claimed Mangu Singh, DMRC's Director (Works).
Once that was taken care of, DMRC then filled the open road, which soon started witnessing cave-ins. "The compaction can never be the same as the version on the undisturbed portion,” Singh said.
Now that things are taken care of, Singh is confident that they would be able to come up with a quality road soon after it stops raining.