Chennai: A young software engineer was killed when a ten-foot scaffolding fell on him from the elevated section of the metro rail network on the arterial GST road on Wednesday morning. Techie Giridharan Lakshmanan, 30, was on the road between OTA and Azhar Khana around 8.50 am when the heavy iron scaffolding fell on him from the elevated corridor 50 feet above the ground. He died instantly. The engineer was riding to his office in Vadapalani then. In trying to avoid the massive scaffolding, two other motorists who were behind the unfortunate software engineer also fell from their bikes and sustained minor injuries.
The impact of the fall is understood to have been so heavy that Giridharan was not only dislodged from the bike despite riding at very slow speed but also bled profusely within seconds after the being knocked down by that huge mass of iron. Eyewitness accounts suggest that the scaffolding fell straight on his helmet before hitting the ground.
Over two-dozen metro workers who were standing atop the elevated corridor alerted their colleagues below and they had the scaffolding cleared from the road in a jiffy. Traffic cops from the nearest signal in front of St Thomas Mount post office, only a hundred meters away, arrived and regulated the traffic, which moved bumper to bumper for the next couple of hours. Both the police and CMRL (Chennai metro rail limited) officials suspect that the fall could have happened due to the scaffolding having been loosely fastened.
St Thomas Mount police claimed that the metro staffers atop the corridor were busy working at that time in violation of the rule that work would go on only between 11 pm and 4 am as stipulated by the traffic police.
Nagarjuna Construction Corporation Limited (NCC), the firm that is executing the OTA station work for CMRL (Chennai metro rail limited), denied the charge, asserting that the workers had just turned up for morning duty and were about to be deputed to different places of the OTA station from there. The safety team of the General consultants (GC) of CMRL is conducting an inquiry. “A decision will be taken after the inquiry gets over,” CMRL managing director P.K. Bansal told Deccan Chronicle, when asked if a fresh safety audit would be ordered on all metro work sites.
The police arrested site engineer S. Arvind and safety engineers R. Sudharshan and M. Dinesh. The techie's family will be duly compensated from third party insurance in accordance with government and insurance norms, a senior officer of NCC Ltd told this paper. Nonetheless, any amount of money will not compensate the loss suffered by Lakshmanan and Geetha whose only son would have lived to become a dad shortly if only he had not ridden under the metro rail pillars on Wednesday morning at that time. “My son said this morning that he would be back soon and now I'll never see him and I feel utterly hopeless,” said Lakshmanan, the distraught retired headmaster, as he waited for the paperwork to be completed at the police station. His wife Geeta was inconsolable.
