Chennai: A car with three passengers got partially sucked into the earth on the middle of a busy city road. Bewildered passers-by screamed for help and several watched in disbelief. Cops arrived in beacon light mounted cars in a jiffy. Traffic came to a grinding halt. Irate commuters honked tirelessly from behind as those on the front left their vehicles to witness the drama. Curiosity drew more crowds.
All this happened in front of the MMC on the arterial EVR Periyar Salai as the ongoing metro rail tunnelling work created a three-metre wide crater around 2.30pm. Luckily nobody was injured, though the vehicle slip-in is a first of its kind in the Metro course line. It took nearly a minute for Ajeez Saiffuddin (50), an iron trader of Mannadi who was in the passenger seat of the car, to come to terms with reality and exit the vehicle.
“For a moment, we did not know what actually happened. The driver put the pedal to the metal and tried to force the vehicle out initially. The wheels screeched, but he could not. An elderly man on the passenger seat peeped out of the car. Passers-by shouted and asked them to come out. Suddenly, they disembarked from the vehicle and moved a safe distance away from the hole,” said nearby teashop owner Bhaskaran.
As crowd gathered, cops from the signal located a few meters away arrived and regulated them. They cordoned off the road with barricades and stopped the traffic instantly, he added. Metro rail officials arrived after a few minutes and stared the repair works. At least three concrete mixers were brought to fill the crater measuring nearly two meters deep. However, it did not happen without the support of a couple of cranes and bull dozers with which they removed a huge metal board they had already put there following traces of a cave in earlier. Around 5pm, the crater was fully filled.
CMRL officials on the spot attributed the caving in to the presence of loose sand below the layer of the road beneath which the TBM (tunnel boring machine) was roaring at a depth of 17 meters.
The TBM has already covered 800 meters from the Madras high court. Another 300-odd meters are to be covered, the officials added. Incidentally, it was in the same area, a similar cave in had happened on May 2. However, Ajeez and company left home to Mannadi after the car was lifted from the crater using a crane brought by CMRL.
Traffic hit near Central for over 3 hours
The unforeseen caving in of the road near a Chennai Metro rail limited (CMRL) construction site on E.V.R.Periyar salai right opposite the Government General Hospital proved to be a traffic nightmare for the cops. Regular flow of traffic in the already congested stretch owing to the CMRL works was further affected because of the accident in which a car got struck. Cops had to summon the services of a crane to lift the vehicle out to safety.
“It took almost three hours before traffic was brought back to normalcy. With GH and Central Station around, it proved to be a tedious job, but we managed to regulate movement of vehicles,” Flower Bazaar Traffic Inspector (Enforcement) Selvaraj said.
The particular area was cordoned off and enforcement officers from other areas chipped in with their services. “We had no other go but to divert traffic and traffic inspectors from Tondiarpet, Muthialpet, Elephant Gate, were also posted at various junctions to ensure free movement of vehicles,” the inspector said, adding, that even senior traffic officials including deputy commissioner Mahesh Kumar were present at the spot overseeing operations.
