Our bridge of sighs
These days our very sick Jamuna Bridge is very much in the news; unfortunately for all the wrong reasons! This largest engineering construction work undertaken in Bangladesh seems to be heading towards a national disaster! Kaptai dam, another monumental work, was however completed during Pakistan time. Here too we managed to make a mess of the water turbine generator's maintenance and repairs, possibly for penny pinching approach to it.
Now dangerous cracks seem to be spreading all over the Jamuna Bridge like cancer! It seems we have to spend a fortune for the diagnosis and partial cure of this very fatally sick bridge. It may be patched up, but will it be as good as we wanted? Possibly not.
Already train speed has been curtailed down to a crawl at 20km. per hour. Some experts opine stopping trains moving on the bridge altogether! If this be so; then what was the purpose of this bridge? In contrast; both the Harding Bridge at Paksey and the Bhairab Bridge at Ashuganj were built many decades ago! The Bhairab Bridge was bombed; and one span fell into the river. Yet both these bridges today handle far more traffic than what was imagined seventy years back! Today long mail trains merrily cross these old bridges at speed.
How and why then this fiasco at the Jamuna Bridge? Common sense indicates that concrete structures are poor in tension and bending strength. It lacks flexibility and elasticity compared to steel, the age old bridge building material! Then why we opted for a concrete bridge? May be a steel bridge would have cost more, and it had to be imported in pieces, and then put together at site. However from hindsight, it would not be as much as the final cost of an imperfect concrete bridge that we are saddled with!
The war damaged Bhairab Bridge was repaired with Indian built steel span, and is now as new!
This is a question that needs to be investigated in depth. It will be interesting to get some response from our many structural engineers. Concrete structures are only good in compressive strength. For such a large structure; a steel construction would have been logical. However, the wise men of Bangladesh went for an RCC structure, possibly the cheaper way out.
It is a sad reflection and a matter of shame for all engineers, and may be they will have to live with it! Did the Korean Company grease its way into the job, giving a cheap option? This seems to be the same type of misadventures we had with some cheap power plants, and the coal mine venture which are now stories in the press; again during Bangladesh days! Maybe I am wrong, but seeing what has happened, no thanks to our statesmen(?) who are second to none in….!!
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