As the eldest of ten children, my father-in-law had to start earning money at a young age to augment the family income, his father being the sole bread winner till then. After completing his diploma in Civil Engineering, he joined the PWD in Madhya Pradesh as a junior engineer and supervisor. His work, building roads and bridges in the interior of the state, was exciting and he loved it. He was stationed in remote corners of India but the thrill of doing something worthwhile for society while at the same time earning money sustained him.
After a few years, there was a big project to be undertaken—a bridge on the Balaghat-Lanji road, across the Dev, a tributary of Bagh river. His senior officers were thinking of giving the work to a construction company but my father-in-law was of the opinion that they themselves could handle it at a much lesser cost.
So the project started with my father-in-law as the in charge. The river was about 350 m wide. The bridge could be built only in the dry season as the river bed remained submerged during the monsoon. This was 1967 and the process of building bridges was different from what it is now. At that time, the wells of the bridges were created using manually operated grabs and winches and there was no pneumatic or hydraulic drilling. The bridge required fourteen twin wells to be built. It was a tedious process and 600 workers worked on it day and night for three seasons.
Problems, big and small, arose, and each one was dealt with successfully. Then, when the bridge was nearing completion, one of the wells refused to sink properly. It remained tilted. Whatever had to be done to rectify the tilt was done, but to no avail. All methods of correcting the problem like sandbagging, digging, etc, were undertaken but each was a failure. It was clear that they had reached a very hard layer of rock which would not budge. And of course they could not blast away the rock without endangering all their hard work.
The young engineer was at the end of his tether. Almost in tears, he wondered if it had been a mistake to take on the project instead of handing it over to construction company. As he stood there, mulling over the problem, he suddenly felt the ground shake. He almost lost his balance and fell down. When the ground finally stopped moving, his tears of frustration turned to tears of joy. The errant well had lost its tilt! He had been praying for a miracle and a miracle happened! After that, work progressed smoothly without any further hitch and remarkably, none of the workers met with any accident till the end.
Pragati Nayak
Email: pragati.16017@gmail.com