Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram   

KWA to re-lay Vayalikkada line

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Kerala Water Authority has decided to re-lay a section of the 400 mm HDPE line laid from Vayalikkada to the Medical College Hospital as part of the Theerapadhom scheme.

About 15 metres of HDPE line would be re-laid at Vayalikkada at a depth of one metre from the road surface using 250 mm cast iron pipes. Two ‘S’ bends would be specially fabricated to enable workers to join the CI pipes to the existing pipeline.

The decision came after the line burst yet again on Monday sending water cascading into a shop and a house across the road. A mother and daughter had a close escape from the surging waters. Subsequently local people stopped KWA officials from repairing the line. The officials were asked to give a guarantee that the line would not burst again. Prior to Monday, the line had burst three times in March and again on April 11.

On Thursday, KWA workers dug a trench about a metre-and-a-half deep preparatory to the re-laying of the line.

Engineers said that the successful digging of the trench proved that there was no problem with laying the HDPE line at a greater depth at the time of the Theerapadhom scheme. Then the line was laid just a few centimetres below the surface by Hydro-Tech, the firm entrusted with the task.

When the line burst repeatedly beginning March this year the KWA blamed Hydro-Tech, arguing that the firm had failed to comply with provisions of the Theerapadhom scheme while laying this line, designed to ferry additional water to the Medical College Hospital.

The Kerala Sustainable Urban Development Project — into which the Theerapadhom scheme was merged — also wrote to the company asking it to re-lay the line at the latter’s own risk and cost.

Hydro-Tech refused and pointed out that KWA engineers had okayed the laying of this line. The firm further pointed out that the HDPE line could not have been laid any deeper as a sample trench dug at the spot had revealed that there was an ‘anchor block structure’ beneath the road surface to support KWA pipelines.

“Today we dug the trench to more than a metre from the road surface. There are lines passing beneath the road here but there are not beneath the HDPE line. There was no problem laying this line at a greater depth, something that Hydro-Tech should have done,” a KWA engineer who inspected the re-laying activity said.

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