This monsoon, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) cold mix manufacturing plants have decreased civic body’s headache of refilling potholes by 75 percent.
According to DNA, every year, around 11,000 tonnes of hot mix is prepared in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s (BMC) asphalt plant at Worli. But it didn’t make any difference to potholes in the city. The BMC adopted the cold mix technique in 2018. The civic body’s Worli plant manufactures 1,500 tonnes of the cold mix for the rainy season. The BMC has its own hot mix plant at Worli, which produces around 11,000 tonnes of hot mix to fill potholes every year. The civic body officials claimed that over 6,000 tonnes of this would be used in the monsoon season and over 4,000 tonnes would be saved for the dry months.
The BMC manufactured 10,000 tonnes of cold mix, but it realised that only 1,000 tonnes was used during the monsoon season. An official from the BMC’s road department told the DNA that, “The hot mix failed to fix potholes in the rainy season. So, we had to fix the same pothole five to six times in a row. It requires 90 percent compression whereas cold mix requires only 10 percent compression and it easily settles in watery areas. Hardly 10 percent of the manufactured cold mix was used to solve the issue.” The civic officials are even thinking of asking road contractors to use a cold mix instead of the hot mix they use to fill potholes during the defect liability period.