THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The much-delayed and crucial pipe-laying work under the railway tracks, as part of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)-aided water supply project, will commence on Wednesday.According to the JICA officials; officials with the Kerala Water Authority and of Larsen and Toubro (L&T), the contractor, everything is in place for the work to begin.The work would see drinking water pipelines being laid under the tracks using the jack and push method, one of the variants of the trenchless methods, widely used to carry out construction work without cutting open the surface. The process is such that pipes are pushed through the earth using hydraulic jack.The horizontal jack-pushing method would commence from near the Kripa Theatre and the pipes would reach near RMS, Thampanoor, on the other side. In addition, pipes would laid across the road also.Thus, altogether, 96 m would be covered, of which 56 m will be under the railway tracks and the rest will be under the main road.The contractor has already made an open trench, of 4.5 m depth. A retaining wall has been constructed and it is meant to take care of the entire frictional force which would be produced when the pipes are pushed in.The common procedure is to lay the casing pipes first. In this particular work, Mild Steel (MS) pipes of 1,200-mm diameter each would be laid first. Some 40 pipes of 2.5 m length and 20 mm thickness would be laid. Through this pipe, the water pipeline, also MS pipeline of 800-mm diameter and 8.8-mm thickness, will be laid.Though the total depth is 4.5 m, the pipes would be laid 2.5 m below the tracks. “We are prepared to tackle all kinds of situations. Concrete construction, rocks or similar obstacles might be there. In fact, we had to change the alignment slightly after we came across two polyethylene pipes of 500 mm diameter. After finalising the new alignment, we found that there is a big wall right at the entry. So, a slight tilting of the alignment was again needed,” said an official with L&T.Some 25 labourers of L&T are all geared up to begin the work. The compound wall of Kripa Theatre had to be dismantled to make the open trench, which is the entry point for labourers and machinery. And once the work is over, the compound wall will be reconstructed, said an L&T official.It is to be remembered that this particular work had come to a standstill after the Railways opposed the laying of the pipelines under the railway tracks citing safety reasons.This had eventually seen L&T threatening to back out of the project. It was after much deliberations and discussions initiated by KWA MD Asok Kumar Singh that the work was given a green signal, that too after holding the soil-testing experiment at the site.
Comments
0 comment