Vikramaditya & John Wilbert
Port Blair, Jul 27: The massive sinkhole which appeared on 24 July 2021 on the main road infront of Dilanipur Bus Stand was claimed to be repaired by APWD on 24 July night but surprisingly on 25 July 2021 the sinkhole reappeared, raising many question over the expertise of APWD.
But the fact is that appearance of sinkholes, is not a new phenomenon, as such sinkholes appeared in many prominent cities and places in past due to various reasons.
However, this was first its of kind of incident in Andaman and hence it gave enough ingredients to troll APWD in social media and many memes were instantly circulated about this incident.
However, when the sinkhole reappeared on 25 July 2021, it left people of Andaman and Nicobar Islands disappointed as they expected much more professionalism from APWD.
When Andaman Sheekha contacted an officer of APWD to ask what when wrong and why the sink hole reappeared after night long repair works, he blamed road digging works for cables by contractors of a private telecom company for this incident.
The APWD officers alleged that a very old underground culvert was damaged in two three places by contractors of Airtel, who reportedly laid underground cable nearby 3 to 3.5 mtr below the road surface nearly one and a half a year back and during the cable laying work they caused huge damaged to the culvert. “The wall of the culvert reportedly collapsed during underground cable laying work because of which there was underground leakage, which caused the sinkhole. The contractor of course might have not done this purposefully but what was the need to lay cable so deep?” he questioned.
He said that now the APWD is digging up the entire culvert area and will place hume pipes on which earth will be placed and once the earth is settled bitumen road will be laid but he said he can’t give a time line for completion of this work as APWD has to deal with underground power cables, telecom cables, water pipelines very delicately to complete this project.
