BENGALURU: While the contractor needs to be held accountable for not putting in place any safety measures to lay the sewage pipeline in Raja Rajeshwari Nagar, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) needs to take a fair share of the blame for permitting such a risky job to be carried out without the mandatory precautionary steps taken, experts feel.
A top BWSSB source told The New Indian Express that it was mandatory on the part of the Water Board to post a Safety Officer whenever any project of this magnitude was carried out. “This Vrishabhavati Sewer (sewage pipeline) project involved laying sewage pipelines running to 1000 mm diameter for more than 15 feet below the ground. It was important BWSSB had a Safety Officer in place for it,” he said. The guidelines laid in place by BWSSB made that mandatory. The work was in progress since end of 2016.
The contractor executing the work for BWSSB had not put in place the mandatory safeguards in place that would prevent soil from caving in. “The BWSSB site engineers should have questioned them about it. However, contractors are generally influential and bypass any objections given by the site engineers by contacting senior BWSSB officials and getting clearances,” the source added.
Chief Engineer of Storm Water Management department in BWSSB, E Nithyananda Kumar, said, “The job was carried out for BWSSB by contractor KBR Infrastructure run by K Babu Raj.”A retired BWSSB engineer said the water board contractors usually sub-contract the work to other smaller firms. “The most important safeguards to be installed are ‘Shoring’ and ‘Strutting’. They are scaffolding techniques that arrest any kind of soil slide. None of them were in place and this helped the soil easily cave in,” he said.