Stop. No road ahead

The municipality’s lack of equipment and expertise to detect crumbling underground utilities has claimed its latest casualty — a road at Kalachowkie caved in on Monday morning.

The municipality’s lack of equipment and expertise to detect crumbling underground utilities has claimed its latest casualty — a road at Kalachowkie caved in on Monday morning.

HT Image

A trench 10 ft deep and 10 m x 20 m across (large enough to swallow an average car) opened up at Shravan Yashwant Chowk off P D’Mello Road at Kalachowkie, near a BEST bus stop.

Civic officials said leaking underground utilities could be the cause. Ashok Shintre, director (Engineering Services and Projects) said: “The cavity was likely caused by old, rotting underground utilities, most likely a storm water drain.”

This is the city’s sixth cave-in in the last three years. Locals and witnesses said that seconds earlier, bus number 52 had stopped at the same spot. “Had the bus waited a few seconds longer, it would have been far more serious,” said Dattaram Patil, a local.

This was the first road concretised in the city in 1984. The life of a cement concretised road is around 40 years. On one side of the road is a 9-mm water pipeline, on the other, an 18-mm water line. There is also a sewage main 23 ft under the road, and a storm water drain above this main.

The municipality has not done anything to prevent multiple cave-ins that have occurred since 2007, starting with the one at Prarthna Samaj. After a stretch of road caved in at Jacob Circle in 2008, the BMC had commissioned a survey of underground utilities with the help of a professor from the Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute. The BMC still has no conclusions from that survey drawn.

“We then asked a private firm to do sample surveys for us. They covered two places – Jacob Circle and Rakhangi Chowk at Worli – but haven’t been able to process the data,” a Roads Department official said.

Experts have also said the chronic lack of coordination between the BMC’s various departments is a factor in incidents like this.

“The Roads Department needs more co-ordination with other departments like Sewage, and Water, so it knows which underground utilities will be affected. It also needs to take sample bores to test the condition of sub-surface earth before laying new slabs,” said N V Merani, chairman of the Standing Technical Advisory Committee.

“Also, reports from earlier investigations are not taken serious at all,” Merani added.