TEAM HERALD
CANACONA: In what could easily have been a design failure, two buildings adjacent to the collapsed building in Ruby Residency could not have been habitable even if they were not slated for demolition by the State government.
According to Sports Minister and local MLA Ramesh Tawadkar, the staircase on the collapsed building provided sole access to the two adjacent buildings. And with the staircase having crumbled with the collapsed building, there was no way flat owners of the two adjacent buildings could have had access to their homes.
“The design of the buildings was so faulty that all these three buildings had only one staircase,” said Tawadkar, while speaking to reporters at the site.
In fact, many officials who visited the site had also expressed surprise that the existing two adjacent buildings did not have any staircase and were perplexed when told that access to these two buildings was only possible by the staircase from the collapsed building.
While questions are being raised over the quality of construction work by the builders Bharat Developers in its phase-II construction of Ruby Residency, the local BJP panel led by Tawadkar has blamed the unavailability of sand in the state as one of the reasons for the substandard mixture of concrete.
“Due to non-availability of sand, it is a well-known fact that most mixing plants use slag as a mixture in Ready-Mix Concrete (RMC), instead of sand, which is in short supply, thereby lowering its quality,” said BJP leader and Loliem-Polem Sarpanch Bushan Prabhugaonkar.
Incidentally, Poi Khot, who brought some of his earthmoving machinery at the collapsed site and was personally attending to rescue and recovery works since Saturday evening, was critical of the quality of RMC. “Action should be taken against those plants that produce substandard RMC.”
