Roads cave in and traffic crawls; don’t step out, cops tell residents

Gurgaon: From roads caving in to crawling traffic, the nightmare of Wednesday’s deluge spilled over to Thursday morning even as the waterlogging in most areas of the Millennium City failed to recede. To prevent casualties and enable civic authorities to carry out repair work, the Gurgaon traffic police issued an advisory, urging residents not to step out unless it’s absolutely necessary.
Two of the worst-hit locations were IFFCO Chowk and Sector 23A, where roads caved in and traffic diversions had to be put in place, reducing the number of functional lanes.
At IFFCO Chowk, a wide area of the carriageway cracked in the morning. Cops rushed to the spot to cordon off the area and issue alerts to the agencies concerned. The Gawar Construction, the private agency responsible for the maintenance of the road, deployed its officials to initiate the repair work. The officials claimed that with such heavy waterlogging, “any road would succumb to some minor structural damages”.
“It’s not that the road has caved in or some big gaping hole has developed. Due to such heavy waterlogging, the upper layer had gotten weak as the water kept seeping in. And when the waterlogging cleared, the road cracked up. We are scraping off the layer and a fresh layer of gravel will be put. Two layers of bitumen will also be laid,” said an official of Gawar Construction.
Similarly on Sector 23A main road, a big 15ft wide and 10ft deep gaping hole had developed on Thursday morning. When the residents of the area were out in the morning to assess the situation of waterlogging and roads, they noticed that a portion of the road that had been broken for over a year now had collapsed.
“There was some water leakage from the drain that runs beneath this stretch. Due to that leakage, the portion of the road was constantly losing its strength and a disaster like this was just waiting to happen,” said Bhawani Shankar Tripathy, a local resident.
According to GMDA, a master drain had suffered damages during the smart grid project and the water leakage had been making the structure weak. “First, the leakage issue will be fixed. Thereafter, the cavity will be cleaned and fresh bitumen will be laid to strengthen the portion. All of these may take 2-3 days, depending on weather conditions and speed of work by other agencies that are also involved in the repair work,” said a GMDA official.
Further, the traffic on Thursday morning crawled across the city as most of the stretches remained inundated. The vehicular pressure on the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway near Narsinghpur on the Delhi-Jaipur side, Sohna road, Bilaspur Chowk and Signature Towers, in particular, was high. In an advisory, the traffic police urged the residents not to come out unless it’s very urgent.
“Due to incessant rains in Gurugram since yesterday, there is waterlogging in some places. So, we request all of you to leave the house only when necessary work is done. Sorry for the inconvenience,” read the advisory.
The request, cops asserted, was not only to support the several maintenance and repair work being carried out by civic bodies but also to avoid tailbacks and any possible road casualties as most of the areas remained inundated even on Thursday.