CHENNAI: Preliminary investigations by the Chennai city police into the Porur building collapse have revealed lack of coordination among the architect, structural engineers and site engineers during the construction. A statement from the police on Sunday said no structural engineer supervised the construction.
The managing director of the construction company, who lacked any technical knowledge, alone supervised the construction.
The police on Sunday arrested six persons, including managing director of the Prime Sristi Housing Private Limited, which developed the ill-fated Belief building, M Manoharan (60) and
his son M Muthukamatchi, who is also director of the company.
Prime Sristi was incorporated as a private company in January 2007 and registered under the Registrar of Companies.
The architect of the project Vijay Bargotra (52), structural engineer Venkatasubramani, site engineers Sankar Ramakrishnan (24) and Duraisingam have also been arrested. They were remanded in judicial custody for 15 days by a Judicial Magistrate before whom they were produced by the police.
“Preliminary enquiry also revealed that the structural engineer did not supervise the execution of the project periodically. The builder did not follow the norms prescribed by the structural engineer. It also appeared that the builder executed the project under the supervision of inexperienced site engineers and the managing director alone supervised the execution. He had no technical knowledge,” said a statement from the police.
The police said the builder did not follow any norms set by the structural engineer. The site engineers engaged by the company were also inexperienced. All the six arrested persons are booked under charges of endangering life or personal safety of others, causing grievous hurt by an act endangering life or personal safety of others and culpable homicide not amounting to murder.
The city police also admitted that the forces were ill-equipped to handle the disaster. “This is the first time the state is facing a disaster of this magnitude. We were ill-equipped to handle this and it has been a learning experience,” they admitted.