You said it, Rajan The first bridge over the Mandovi collapsed because the job had been entrusted to an organisation who had only built bridges across fresh water rivers with water flowing in only one direction -- so the foundation on the seaward got corroded or eaten away and the bridge collallpsed -- killing, if I remember right one person definitely (because a scooter was found at the bottom -- no bodies were recovered.
The new bridge built to replace this collapsed bridge lost one slab while building -- I do not know if there were any persons killed The "new" bridge was completed and the "old" one patched up and these are the two bridges we now use to cross the Mandovi. This third bridge is so high and seems etherel -- looks beautiful particularly when lighted up as it was was last night. I remember the story of the"Firth" railway bridge in Scotland which collalpsed when high winds and the vibrations of a train crossing apparently caused the bridge to swing beyond its calculated safe vibration level taking the train into the Firth. Have any wind studies been made about this new bridge -- the full force of the monsoon comes up the Mandovi river!!! Cheers to our bridge builders -- but then we are so many, many Indians -- what if a few go faster than the Good Lord planned for them. Aloysius D'Souza On Sat, Jan 26, 2019 at 3:47 PM Rajan Parrikar <[email protected]> wrote: > It is puzzling watching Goans exult over the THIRD bridge over the Mandovi. > Hasn’t anyone noticed - it is the THIRD (as in THREE) strip of concrete > over just a kilometre’s span of water where just ONE would suffice. > > > Have Goans no sense of shame? Even a desperate, impoverished sub-Saharan > African country would shrug this off as meh. Yet Goans preen as if it is a > great engineering feat. If you truly want to see an impressive feat of > engineering, you don’t have to go far. Just look down towards Ribandar and > you will see PONTE DE LIÑHARES, built in the 17th C during the Portuguese > era. THAT was a tour-de-force of engineering. Not this second-rate Third > World turd touted by the Eye-Eye-Tee genius. > > > Look closely at the construction and it screams Third World. Has the debris > underneath the pillars been cleared? I doubt it. The hallmark of any Indian > construction project is to leave behind unfinished business. There’ll be > mounds of dirt and debris and garbage all around. > > > This bridge ought not to be a source of pride. Instead it is a monument to > corruption, to incompetence, to an utter lack of engineering standards. But > standards and Indians don’t belong in the same sentence, and since Goa is > now part of the Indian sewer… >
