PONDA – The Cast iron ( CI) 750 mm diameter damaged line will be connected with Ductile iron ( DI). The PWD officials on Wednesday said that the CI and DI pipelines would be connected without welding the same. Officials said this 750 mm line will be restored in two days. “By tomorrow (Thursday), evening, work would be completed. The pipeline will be laid on a concrete bed of 1 meter. That is at its existing level,” said an official on Wednesday.
Sources said that the officials took a call not to bend the 750 mm dia pipeline, given that it took seven days to repair the 900 mm dia pipeline, while repairing the damaged portions.
The huge amount of time it took to bend the 900 mm dia pipeline along with the machinery, material, money and manpower used has raised a lot of questions given that the government kept postponing its deadline for the work that was expected to have been completed by Sunday initially.
On Wednesday, MGP leader Deepak Dhavalikar along with locals questioned the delay in meeting the original deadline and why it has taken so long. Dhavalikar said that the pipeline should have been laid at its existing level and claimed that the engineers and government has failed to restore water supply in time and properly. Locals also questioned why the pipeline was not relaid at the existing level by constructing concrete pillars or using a minor truss bridge instead of lowering and bending the pipe. They also questioned why this was not looked into earlier on.
Sandeep Parkar, a local resident questioned why so much money had been spent on temporary work when there were plans to shift the location of the pipeline to the other side of the road after the monsoons. “The government needs good and qualified engineers,” he quipped.
Meanwhile, while the Opa water was diverted to provide water to some areas of Ponda, other areas including that Marcel, Priol, Khandola, Bhetki and Cumbarjua have gone dry due as the 750 mm dia pipeline was not replaced yet. Locals had also complained of there being not enough tankers sent to their areas. On Wednesday, locals from Marcel questioned the PWD Junior Engineer about the problems and warned of coming onto the streets to protest after they were told they would still have to wait for few more days.
