John Wilbert & Poovarasan
Kadamtala, Apr 06: The service of MVF Austin III was withdrawn from Humphrey Strait today from 10 AM to 2.00 PM for technical reasons, leaving dozens of heavy vehicles stranded at Kadamatala Jetty, Uttara for several hours.
According to details, there were leakages in the exhaust area of the vehicle ferry MVF Austin III for which the technical team, decided to withdraw the service of the vehicle ferry and started repair works.
As brining spare parts from Port Blair was impossible the technical team applied M-Seal to stop the leakage and waited for nearly two hours. Surprisingly the trick worked.
After nearly four hours, the vehicle ferry was pressed backed into service.
Sadly till then, large number of Heavy Vehicles remained stranded at Kadamatala Jetty as the other vehicle ferry MVF Austin IV was not taking loaded heavy vehicles onboard because of a few leakages found last month in the vehicle ferry.
Sources said that last month a temporary dry docking was arranged at Kadamatala for the vehicle ferry MVF Austin VI and after which some welding works were carried out to fix the leakages in the vessels. Now for the safety of the vessel, heavily loaded buses or cargo trucks are not taken onboard MV Austin VI since then.
Today when service of MVF Austin III was withdrawn for nearly four hours and MVF Austin IV was not taking heavily loaded buses or cargo trucks onboard, huge number of heavy vehicles including passenger buses were found stranded at Kadamtala Jetty.
Finally when MVF Austin III was pressed back into service by 4.30 PM most of the heavily loaded buses or cargo trucks could cross Humphrey Strait.
As per sources, the Shipping Services is planning to send MV Pillowpanja to Middle Strait within next few days and also planning to send MV Kadamtala to Humphrey strait so that MVF Austin VI could be brought to Port Blair for repair.
It is also learnt that the spare parts for MV Austin III will be sent to Kadamtala by first gate of ATR tomorrow morning and on tomorrow night the vehicle ferry MVF Austin III will be repaired properly.
