Army rebuilds fallen bridge across Barapullah, in four days flat

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The Indian Army, which stepped in to build a Bailey Bridge, the last resort of the Organising Committee after the foot overbridge near the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium collapsed, is almost through with the work. Army officers said the bridge, work on which started on Saturday, is expected to be ready by Tuesday. More than 600 combat engineers from the Madras Engineer Group, known as the Madras Sappers, are on the job.
The bridge itself takes off from the remnants of its collapsed predecessor. Commanding Officer Col Dinesh Khanna said the concrete pillars on either side of the elevated Barapullah Nullah road, on which the earlier structure rested, was found safe and therefore the new bridge would rest on them. “We were informed late in the afternoon on September 25, and work commenced the same day,” said Khanna, even as last-minute preparations were on in the city to honour a bid awarded seven years back. “First, a feasibility study was done, based on which we drew up the design. The result is a standard Bailey Bridge. The only addition is the three piers we have added for safety,” said Khanna.

The Bailey Bridge is a military structure made of pre-fabricated, portable parts, made almost entirely of metal. The three piers that support the new bridge are of varying heights in the 17-20 feet range. “We have made sure that their base itself remains horizontal by using sandbags,” said Khanna. The parts that constitute the structure are light enough to be carried by humans. By evening, the basic framework, consisting of iron grills serving as support for the floor and the railings, was already on the piers.

The Sappers were talking in a babble of accented Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu. Groups of four uniformed men would walk up to an iron sheet lying on the ground, and one of them would murmur ‘lift’ in English. A routine only Army training can choreograph would see the sheet being lifted off the ground in one swoop. Many such lifts later, a “roadbed” was beginning to take shape, with the sheets being bolted to the main structure. Finally, pieces of wood, painted black and white, were kept on either side to form the curb.

Khanna refused to be drawn into an estimation of how much of the work was complete but added that there will be a mandatory testing for safety before the bridge is handed over. “The roadbed is about 12 feet wide and can even take vehicular traffic. The bridge will be constructed in a way so as to accommodate much more than the number of people currently estimated,” he said.

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bridge pic unte veyyi mama