An incomplete pedestrian bridge which collapsed on the Ring Road near Defence Phase 4 on Thursday had been declared dangerous by engineers eight months ago, The Express Tribune has learnt.
The bridge collapsed around 10am. No one was hurt, but the collapse led to a traffic jam. On June 28, 2012, a driver was killed when a pedestrian bridge on the Ring Road collapsed on his truck. An inquiry found that the truck’s bucket had been up and had crashed into the top of the concrete bridge, causing it to collapse.
The National Logistics Cell (NLC) had been building the bridge at Package 17 eight months ago, but was stopped after Lahore Ring Road Authority (LRRA) engineers declared it to be dangerous during an inspection, noting that the beam section of the bridge was cracked, said LRRA officials on the condition of anonymity.
The LRRA directed the NLC to take the beam off the pillars and replace it with a new beam so that work on the pedestrian bridge could be completed, and also for safety reasons, the sources said,
The beam (girder) that collapsed on Thursday was originally meant for a pedestrian bridge at Package 6 of the Ring Road. But the provincial government ordered that the instead of a concrete bridge, this should be a steel bridge, in view of the recent incident in which an overhead collapsed on a truck, killing the driver.
A few months later, LRRA officials told the NLC that they could use the beam to build a bridge at Package 17. The beam developed a crack during transport but was put up anyway. In an inspection before the bridge was finished, LRRA engineers detected the crack and instructed the NLC to take the bridge down, the LRRA officials said.
This correspondent contacted several officials from the NLC, but none was willing to talk about why the NLC had not taken the bridge down. NLC Punjab Project Director Shahid Majeed was said to be out of the country.
LRRA Director (Engineering) Col (r) Waheed was contacted several times and assured The Express Tribune that he would talk on the record, but he later stopped answering his phone.
There are more than 20 pedestrian bridges on the Ring Road, of which 16 are made from concrete and the others from steel.
Published in The Express Tribune, May 24th, 2013.