Road caves in at Kilpauk; CMRL in denial mode

A sinkhole covering almost a quarter of the lane (Egmore-Koyambedu side) appeared when the road caved in around 4 am a few paces away from the traffic signal at EVR Periyar Salai- Taylor’s Road intersection. Though CMRL (Chennai Metro Rail Limited) was in denial mode, it undertook the repairs, which included filling the sinkhole with readymade concrete before covering it with heavy metal sheets.

Saturday’s was the third such incident in a little over a month. On April 9, a huge portion of Anna Salai near US Consulate caved in, leaving a sinkhole so large that a MTC bus and a luxury sedan got trapped in it. Unlike the Anna Salai incident, where tunnel boring machines were ‘roaring’ at a depth of 18 metres at the time of the incident, tunneling was over at Kilpauk long back. “It was due to soil displacement. We have repaired the caved-in portion. No tunneling work is happening there now,” the CMRL public relations manager Tamil Mozhi Amuth told DTNext. 

That the road caved in even without any work being done underground has opened a can of worms for CMRL, which had claimed immediately after Anna Salai cave-in that it would install underground sensors to measure soil displacement, the same reason it has attributed to today’s cave-in. Saturday’s incident has also raised some serious questions on the efficacy of monitoring mechanism and the impact of trains moving underground, as the incident happened during the period when the agency was operating trains after safety commissioner’s inspection ahead of commercial launch.