Kolkata: Thursday’s water seepage into the passenger evacuation shaft of East-West Metro’s tunnel below Bowbazar’s Durga Pituri Lane would not affect the timeline set for the corridor’s full run, KMRC officials said. While implementing agency KMRC is chasing a March 2025 deadline to complete the last leg of the project, contractors ITD ITD-Cementation hopes to ready the Esplanade-Sealdah section by April 2025.
“The water leakage has stopped. What happened on Thursday was minor. The six buildings around the spot were vacated as a precautionary measure. We have done it many times in the past,” a senior KMRC official told TOI. “We hope to complete the last-mile job by April next year as long as things are in our control and provided nothing untoward happens,” an ITD official said
Currently, East-West Metro runs in two disjointed sections: a 9.4km stretch from Sector V to Sealdah and then, a 4.8km section from Esplanade to Howrah Maidan. It can run its full 16.6-km stretch only after the 2.5-km gap between Esplanade and Sealdah stations is linked.
On Thursday night, water gushed out at 150 litres per minute from inside the under-construction 20m-deep egress shaft below Durga Pituri Lane. Around midnight, 52 residents, living in six buildings in the vicinity, were evacuated. This was the second evacuation those 11 families faced in the past two weeks, when they were told to shift out on Aug 26. A notice from KMRC had then stated that they would have to stay at hotels till Sept 5 for the work of linking the egress shaft with the Metro tunnels by the construction of a cross-passage. But they were allowed to return home earlier on Sept 2, “as the work of the cross-passage was completed”. However, three days later, around 10 pm on Thursday, the water seepage began as work was on to remove the secant piles (cylindrical foundations to support the cross-passage).
KMRC MD Anuj Mittal met the residents at the site and said, “The soil condition is to blame. We have built 15km of the corridor but are stuck with 200m for five years. But now, we are nearing the end of the problem.” Echoing him, an engineer involved in the project said, “The water seepage caught us off guard as we were sure there would be no more of this now that we have successfully completed the cross-passage inside the egress shaft. But it caused no ground settlement or fresh damage to the surrounding buildings.”