Kolkata: 10th house crumbles in four days in disaster zone

KOLKATA: A portion of yet another house in the Bowbazar area collapsed on Wednesday — the 10th building to cave in fully or partially in the last 96 hours — and some others developed fresh cracks, bringing to fore the very real danger of one of the oldest districts in the city’s heart ending up as a zone of crumbling buildings.
KMC engineers who inspected the affected zone on Wednesday feared that all houses in a 200m-radius could become vulnerable if the KMRC team did not arrest the subsidence below Durga Pithuri Lane.

On Saturday evening, tunnel-boring machine Chundee, working 14m under Bowbazar, hit an aquifer, damaging 18 buildings, four of them seriously. The next day, as many as 375 residents had to be evacuated, even as several buildings crashed like a pack of cards. Till Wednesday evening, more than 75 buildings were damaged, of which 44 have been evacuated.
Over the next few weeks, both KMC and KMRC have an enormous task at hand.
Though KMRC had sought permission from KMC to demolish at least 15 buildings that it had assessed to be the worst affected, the latter denied permission after structural engineers and geotechnical experts from Jadavpur University found the buildings too hazardous to enter.
Structures surviving on borrowed time
To get the extent of the damage, it’s important to understand the area and its architecture. Several of the affected houses were already in bad shape and figured on KMC’s list of insecure buildings. With a lot of them constructed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, structural engineers and architects believe they were anyway surviving on borrowed time. Sheer age, coupled with the nature of the constructions, made them vulnerable.
“Most of these houses were constructed by ‘mistris’ or master craftsmen who had a lot of experience but no engineering knowledge. Since they are all brick-and-lime-mortar structures on brickwork foundation, they are prone to toppling if the earth sinks,” said architect Partha Ranjan Das.
The number of evacuees is likely to go up to 900 on Thursday, when an adjoining slum is also emptied out. On Wednesday, a decision was taken to evacuate all 400-plus inhabitants of the slum at 12 Gour Dey Lane after KMRC officials detected the wall of an adjoining multi-storeyed building was leaning dangerously towards it.
Fresh cracks were reported from several buildings in and around Durga Pithuri Lane, Shyakrapara Lane, Gour Dey Lane and Hidaram Banerjee Lane on Wednesday morning. Around 11.30am, the facade of a two-storeyed building on 9 Shyakrapara Lane collapsed, leaving louvred wooden windows dangling precariously over the alley. Owner Mamata Sen and her son and daughter had been hurriedly evacuated early on Sunday with hundreds of other residents from the neighbourhood.
“The area is so congested that mechanical demolition cannot be carried out. At present, the buildings are so unsafe that manual demolition attempts would put life at risk. We have therefore not allowed any demolition activity,” said a KMC buildings department official.
Though KMRC has been pumping tonnes of concrete into the earth to stop the subsidence, KMC engineers feel it will take at least one more week for the soil to settle. “Once the subsidence ceases, we will carry out another survey before permitting any demolition,” the KMC official said. A civic team has been deployed in the area.