Road dug up at Cauvery junction

Road dug up at Cauvery junction
BWSSB Carrying Out Maintenance On Blocked Drainage Pipe
— Akshata Acharya

Bangalore: Cauvery junction is again in the news for the wrong reasons. After BBMP’s magic box left commuters negotiating waterlogged roads, a blocked drainage pipe from Sadashivnagar has now spelt more trouble at the busy junction.
The much-talked-about underpass has run into rough weather from the very beginning. Its ‘72-hour construction time’ eventually ran into many weeks and it was waterlogged soon after its inauguration. On Thursday, to clear a blocked drainage pipe, BWSSB dug up a road at the exit point of the underpass, leading to BDA junction.
According to BWSSB assistant executive engineer, Phani Bhushan, they received a complaint on Wednesday around 10 pm that a drainage pipe was blocked and sewage water was receding at a slow pace. Officials arrived to identify the spot and it took them about 10 hours to locate the blockage.
Work is on and the road has been dug up to 15 feet to rectify the problem. However, the surprise element this time is that vehicular traffic is more or less unaffected. BWSSB officials have marked out the area and are working within the drawn margin. “It is a very important road leading to BIA. We cannot afford to cause traffic congestion because of the maintenance work. If the manhole that was covered during road-layering was still present, our work would have been easier and the problem could have been solved in an hour or two,’’ explained Phani Bhushan.
The suspected cause for the blockage is either a big stone, cement bags or plastic bags that may have been dumped in gutters in residential layouts. Officials blamed irresponsibilty of citizens with regard to disposal of plastic bags and construction material.
BWSSB officials assured that the maintenance work would be completed by Thursday evening and the drainage water would be let into other manholes to make the road stench-free. The dug-up ground will be covered by a new manhole to avoid digging the road in future and thus ensure immediacy in any sort of maintenance work taken up in this area.