With the city coming under a blanket of rain, the underpass near Le Meridien hotel, which was left almost unusable due to flooding, was closed to traffic since Friday evening.
The traffic police have put up barricades to restrict people from entering the waterlogged underpass. However, some who tried their luck, had to turn back after reaching the entry.
Residents of the area and frequent travellers complain that the underpass is closed to traffic every time it rains. As a result, traffic jams become a regular affair. Traffic heading towards the international airport and Bellary Road is affected, especially during peak hours.
Advertising professional P V Sagar says, “On the one hand, we have pothole-ridden roads and badly planned underpasses like this force us to wait in traffic for hours. On Friday, I took the underpass but the next day, traffic cops stopped and asked me to take a different route as it was closed,” he rued.
The BBMP is aware of this problem and officials say it will be rectified soon. BBMP Engineer-in-Chief Ranga Raju said he received the complaint on Saturday morning. “The underpass was closed due to water-logging. There is a storm water drain underneath and it might have been blocked. We will set it right,” he said. Adviser to the government on infrastructure, Ashwin Mahesh, says, “They simply don’t know the underground infrastructure. The idea of GIS (Geographical Information System) is totally absent in BBMP. A civic agency can avail GIS to know where the water and sewage lines, electrical cables and telephone cables run. We have different agencies digging the road and we construct underpasses without taking these things into consideration. That is why the problem of water-logging,” he said.
ACP (Traffic and Security) B Dayanand said traffic cops face huge problems dealing with peak-hour traffic every time it rains. “We have given a list of vulnerable areas, including underpasses, to BBMP to set it right,” he said.
