BENGALURU: In light of the recent accident at Hebbal, the BWSSB has issued orders stating that the Chief Engineer of Waste Water Management, the Additional Chief Engineers of different Zones and the Executive Engineers of the board’s Circles where the Plants are located will be held responsible in future for all safety-related aspects of the STP.
The responsibility so far had been on the contractor only. “If this step had been initiated earlier, the engineers would have been careful of safety and the accident would never have occurred,” said a BWSSB source.
BWSSB Chairman Tushar Girinath told The New Indian Express that a team from Structural Engineering Research Centre (SERC), in Chennai, will be visiting the City to carry out a third party inquiry into the accident. “Since the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has now refused to do it, SERC has been fixed as the agency to conduct the technical probe into the incident. The team will visit the spot on Friday and alert us on the time frame and the staff required to conduct the probe,” he said.
Finally, civil engineers posted at STPs
Following a report in The New Indian Express on June 19 in connection with the accident at the Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) in Hebbal, ‘Lack of civil engg expertise in BWSSB led to collapse’, the water board has issued orders to post seven civil engineers at the STPs in Hebbal, Koramangala and Challaghatta Valley and Vrishabhavati Valley. They will replace the existing electrical and mechanical engineers there.
The civil engineers posted are K N Rajiv,T R Sreenivas, S R Hemanth Kumar, Made Gowda, Ramanand, Ravindra Kumar and Satish Reddy. However, the Chief Engineer of Waste Water Management Nithyananda Kumar continues to hold his post despite his electrical engineering background because of the lack of civil engineers in the rank of a Chief Engineer.