Bangalore- A citizen's critical view..

Collapse and Chaos!- An extremely smelly issue!!

Collapse and chaos

What was to happen when an old sanitary line was blasted with water at high-pressure for over several days? A final collapse as it succumbed to pressure!!

This situation led angry motorists to cry themselves hoarse as they lambasted hapless traffic police personnel who were setting up barricades and who were forced to reverse their pet one-ways. It was lucky that the collapse didn’t claim any victims through injuries or deaths. The BWSSB has now swung into action replacing the old sanitary line with a larger, newer line.

This will come as a relief to residents living downhill, notably residents of Hayes Road and D’Souza Road, who for several days have been patiently bearing the presence of a large sewerage clearance machine at the junction of Residency Road and Hayes Road, disrupting traffic and causing an extremely smelly situation especially for the residents of D’Souza Road, as the sewage water outflow was let out during the process of blasting it through the sewers and the smelly water and sludge following the slope of the roads, collected on D’Souza Road, for several days while sanitary engineers blasted their way through, until relief came to the residents when the line finally gave way. The engineers were preoccupied with the problem of clearance of the blockage and not interested in where the sewerage outflow was going. There was no plan nor scheme in place to collect the sewerage in a separate device/ machine. Meanwhile residents of D’Souza Road and Hayes Road were forced to go about their normal business, while wading through sewerage water or driving through it.

The stink and filth will hopefully no more wend its way downhill, though rainwater will continue flooding D’Souza Road, courtesy of a leading IT company that acting as a generous benefactor a few years earlier gave a ‘gift’ to Hayes Road on which its office is located. The gift consisted of:

1) Pavement barriers.
2) Of course the sealing up of storm water drain inlets on Hayes Road..
3) Re-tarring of the road.
4) Changing the camber or sloping of the road while re-tarring so that water doesn’t flow on the surface of Hayes Road, but is diverted into D’Souza Road.
5) A slight encroachment on the pavement by their power unit.


While the replacement of the drain will cause a temporary annoyance to angry motorists, it will come hopefully as a relief to the residents from smelly sewerage but not rainwater.

-Sunil Pichamuthu

posted by Sunil Pichamuthu @ 12:27 AM
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