Elevated road alteration plan draws experts’ ire

Neeraj Bagga

Tribune News Service

Amritsar, August 13

Former engineering officials, associated with the elevated road, have warned of a disaster in case the officials concerned go ahead with their plan to cut a portion of the road to pave way for raising six terminals for the buses of the BRTS.

Seeking anonymity, they said dismantling any part of the concrete slab, which rests over a row of pillars, could prove catastrophic as in such a scenario the entire weight in thousands of tonnes might not be evenly distributed.

The elevated road was constructed to provide relief to commuters from the highly congested traffic on the GT road between the ISBT and Maqbool Chowk. However, after its completion, the Bhandari railway overbridge emerged as a big traffic bottleneck.

The existing 3.5 km elevated road on the Amritsar-Jalandhar GT road, touching the Bhandari Bridge, is a part of the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) corridor in which retrofitted BRTS stations are being set up.

After several experiments to ease the traffic chaos on and around the Bhandari bridge, a new two-lane slip flyover was raised to accommodate the GT road-bound traffic.

PWD (B&R) Executive Engineer Jasbir Singh Sodhi said his department was supervising the construction work on six BRTS bus terminals on the elevated road. He brushed away the fear of demolishing a part of the slab to raise the stations for the BRTS buses. Only parapet of the elevated road is being demolished, he added.

The elevated road is the first-of-its-kind single pillar segmental design four-lane road in north India. Normally, such roads are raised on column beam arrangement technique supported by two pillars on both sides tied with a beam, making it a sophisticated engineering design.

The use of heavy machinery and hammering to break its parapet, concrete and iron bars sends vibrations to the entire segment. Each segment, a kind of concrete slab, is perched atop the pillars after constructing these on ground.

Former officials associated with the project expressed shock over the use of such crude method for demolition work.

They wondered why chemical treatment for cutting iron bars and concrete was not used.