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India flyover collapse kills 14; scores feared trapped
Friday, April 01, 2016: M. Alenzi
KOLKATA: A flyover under construction in the bustling Indian city of Kolkata collapsed yesterday on to vehicles and street vendors below,
killing at least 14 people with more than 100 people feared trapped. Residents used their bare hands to try to rescue people pinned under a
100-metre (110-yard) length of metal and cement that snapped off at one end and came crashing down in a teeming commercial district near
Girish Park. The concrete had been laid last night at this part of the bridge, resident Ramesh Kejriwal told Reuters.
I am lucky as I was planning to go downstairs to have juice. When I was thinking about it, I saw that the bridge had collapsed. Video
footage aired on TV channels showed a street scene with two auto rickshaws and a crowd of people suddenly obliterated by a mass of falling
concrete that narrowly missed cars crawling in a traffic jam. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, whose centre-left party is seeking re-election in
the state of West Bengal next month, rushed to the scene.We will take every action to save lives of those trapped beneath the collapsed
flyover.
Rescue is our top priority, she said. Banerjee, 61, said those responsible for the disaster would not be spared. Yet she herself faces
questions about a construction project that has been plagued by delays and safety fears. A newspaper reported last November that Banerjee
wanted the flyover already five years overdue to be completed by February. Project engineers expressed concerns over whether this
would be possible, The Telegraph said at the time.
The disaster could play a role in the West Bengal election, one of five being held next month that will give an interim verdict on Prime
Minister Narendra Modis nearly two years in power. Indian company IVRCL was building the 2-km (1.2-mile) Vivekananda Road flyover,
according to its web site. Its shares closed down 5 percent after falling by up to 11.8 percent on news of the disaster. IVRCLs director of
operations, A.G.K. Murthy, said the company was not sure of the cause of the disaster. We did not use any inferior quality material and we
will cooperate with the investigators, Murthy told reporters in Hyderabad where the firm is based. We are in a state of shock.
NO
ACCESS
A coordinated rescue operation was slow to get under way, with access for heavy lifting gear and ambulances restricted by the buildings on
either side of the flyover and heavy traffic. Police said that 78 injured had been taken to Kolkatas Medical College Hospital after the disaster
struck at around noon. Most were bleeding profusely. The problem is that nobody is able to drive an ambulance to the spot, said Akhilesh
Chaturvedi, a senior police officer. Eyewitness Ravindra Kumar Gupta, a grocer, said two buses carrying more than 100 passengers were
trapped.
Eight taxis and six auto rickshaws were partly visible in the wreckage. Every night, hundreds of labourers would build the flyover and they
would cook and sleep near the site by day, said Gupta, who together with friends pulled out six bodies. The government wanted to
complete the flyover before the elections and the labourers were working on a tight deadline Maybe the hasty construction led to the
collapse. Reuters

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/02/world/asia/kolkata-collapse-indiaoverpass.html?ref=world
Construction Firm Charged in India Overpass Collapse
By NIDA NAJAR and HARI KUMARAPRIL 1, 2016

The police in Kolkata, India, on Friday filed charges of culpable

homicide and criminal breach of trust against the company that was
building an elevated highway that collapsed on Thursday, and then
detained eight executives of the firm.
At least 23 people were killed in the accident in the crowded Ganesh
Talkies area of Kolkata, and 85 people were injured, the police said. At
a news conference on Friday in Hyderabad, where the firm, IVRCL, is
headquartered, company officials said they were shocked by the
incident but refused to comment on the police complaint, saying they
had not seen it.
As rescue operations continued on Friday, television footage showed
cranes lifting steel plates, bulldozers clearing concrete rubble, and
workers cutting metal slabs into smaller pieces to lift them out of the
wreckage. Part of the highway was twisted and hanging down, said
Sandeep Channan, an official with the National Disaster Relief Force,
and engineers were working to stabilize it.
IVRCL, a major construction firm carrying out irrigation, road, mining
and power projects across India, as well as in Sri Lanka, the Middle
East and Afria, has come under intense scrutiny.
Derek OBrien, a spokesman for the state of West Bengal, which
includes Kolkata, said the company had been barred from doing
business in Uttar Pradesh state and, local news outlets reported,
several other states.
The company has a bad reputation, he said to a reporter from the
news agency ANI. The law will take its own course. No one will be
spared. IVRCL could not be reached immediately for comment.
West Bengals chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, told the Press Trust of
India that the company was awarded the contract to build the highway
in 2009 under a previous administration.

Bureaucratic and other delays hampered the project from the start.
The company said on its website that the project was among its
toughest, cutting through a crowded neighborhood and requiring
heavy machinery. Construction time was limited to six hours a day.