WR buried its report warning of massive corrosion

An inspection via WR in April had detected corrosion on Gokhale Bridge but the report used to be by no means despatched to BMC; WR says it needs to check the file before commenting.

The Andheri road overbridge that collapsed onto the railway tracks on Tuesday, resulting in 5 people suffering accidents and a day-long disruption of teach services and products, used to be a crisis waiting to happen, consistent with the Western Railway’s premonsoon inspection carried out just two months in the past.

While a big tragedy used to be avoided, thank you largely to an alert motorman who carried out emergency brakes to halt the teach metres from the crash web site, it has now emerged that a caution used to be certainly sounded but it had long past unheeded.

A senior railway legitimate told Mumbai Mirror that a bridge inspector from the railway’s Andheri section had carried out an in depth survey of the 47-year-old Gokhale Bridge in April and located large-scale corrosion alongside the bridge.

“A report used to be submitted to the divisional engineering department announcing there used to be a necessity for maintenance work to be carried out in a deliberate way. The engineering department had drafted an offer in line with the inspection report,” the legitimate told this newspaper.

Further inquiries via this newspaper published the repairs proposal used to be despatched to the railway’s accounts department for value estimation, the place it remained “under procedure”. “As per the protocol, the associated fee estimation will have to had been forwarded to the BMC to unencumber the budget for the bridge’s repairs, since it used to be a BMC belongings. The BMC would have carried out its own inspection before freeing the budget. In this case, the associated fee estimation used to be by no means despatched to the BMC,” a Western Railway source stated.

On Tuesday, the Western Railway, while making public a railway-BMC joint inspection in November final 12 months, stated the audit “didn’t in finding any structural flaw in the bridge”, very easily selected to forget about its own discovering that revealed the problems in the construction. Even final evening when this newspaper contacted the Western Railway’s public members of the family officer, Ravinder Bhaker, he refused to confirm, or deny, the story.

“I cannot comment nowadays as I will have to check the file that used to be despatched to the finance department after the inspection, and the remarks via finance department. Can’t comment with out having a look at the file,” Bhaker stated.

According to a Western Railway source, Gokhale Bridge, which connects Andheri East to West, used to be final repaired in 2011, when the BMC had launched Rs 16 lakh against the Western Railway’s value estimation of Rs 18 lakh. Following Tuesday’s incident, the Western Railway and the BMC were given into a spat, with each claiming it used to be the other’s duty to take care of the bridge.

Taking a powerful view of the “passing the dollar” angle, the Bombay High Court the previous day pulled up the BMC, announcing any incident touching on civic amenities in the town which impacts voters used to be BMC’s duty, and that it can't go the dollar to other authorities.

“The BMC has to begin taking duty for all this. It can't say that the property belongs to railways. You (BMC) can't go the dollar or wash off your fingers announcing this belongings belongs to some other authority,” the court docket stated, giving example of final 12 months’s stampede at the Elphinstone Road foot overbridge, when “nobody took the duty”.

Five people have been injured in Tuesday’s bridge cave in. One of them, Asmita Katkar, is in vital condition (PIC: SATYAJIT DESAI)