KOLKATA: The Majerhat bridge will be opened in the first week of December, state public works department (PWD) minister Aroop Biswas said on Wednesday while inspecting the newly-built structure.
The bridge that connects the city to New Alipore, Behala and beyond collapsed on September 4, 2018. Commissioning of the new four-lane bridge will signal the end to commuting pangs of scores of people who currently take detours and get stranded in snarls.
“The bridge has been built in record time. To my knowledge, it usually takes 24 months to construct a cable-stayed bridge. Nine months were misspent due to pending railway permissions and another three months were wasted because of the pandemic. We essentially completed the bridge in about a year,” Biswas said. “Around 99.8% work of the work is complete,” he said.
A 260m stretch of the 650m bridge stands over railway tracks. The lifeline is, therefore, a road overbridge (ROB) that falls within the jurisdiction of Eastern Railway (ER). Approvals from the railways were needed at various stages of construction. The commissioner of railway safety (CRS), under the aviation ministry, too, has had the final say on several issues. The CRS gives the safety approval to any new railway project in India.
Last week, during the load test of the bridge, Anant M Chowdhary, CRS, eastern circle, visited the site along with ER engineers and expressed satisfaction over the work. After the load test, the 84 cables of Majerhat bridge were fine-tuned. The cables, brought from Switzerland, hold the 260m deck slab. Engineers had to ensure the load-bearing capacity of cables was perfectly tuned. The bridge will be Kolkata’s third cable-stayed bridge after Vidyasagar Setu and Nivedita Setu.
The new ROB will be Kolkata’s first ‘instrumented bridge’ and the most protected. The overall maintenance of the bridge will be data-driven. “Instrumentation will be done after opening the bridge. The bridge will be equipped with sensors to provide real-time data showing how the new bridge functions against static and dynamic vehicular load,” a PWD official said. According to the general arrangement drawing (GAD) or masterplan, the onus of maintenance will be on PWD. But ER can suspend traffic on the ROB if it finds the ‘instrumentation’ failing for more than a month.