Part of the service road after pressure to pressure from the NH-66 waterfront in Kooriyad near Tirurangadi. | Photo Credit: Sakkeer Hussain
The collapse of the National Motorway Highway-66 in Kooriyad near Tirurangadi on Monday (May 19, 2025) raised serious concerns about utilities in the country for infrastructure projects.
Despite the Central Government and the Indian National Highway (NHAI), they take corrective measures such as the Technical Commission investigation and the Black List of the Supplier, the KNR Constructions Ltd., concerns about the quality of the building and access to the development of the state infrastructure.
According to a senior geotechnical engineering consultant Jayakrishnan Menon, it seems that the 200 -meter collapse is a classic case of bearing capacity failure, where the soil under the waterfront could support weight, leading to structural failure.
“It may look like another landslide for an untrained eye, but for engineers it is a textbook case of failure of acceptable capacity – a type of failure where the Earth simply cannot handle the weight it has on it,” said Menon.
Veteran engineer and metroman E. Sreedharan responded quickly to collapse as an engineering failure. He said that the viaduct method should be used in such a low -laid area.
According to Mr. Menon, it was not just a fault of construction, but rather engineering failure. “It is so clear from the photos that they could be used in building engineering textbooks to explain this type of failure,” he said.
More than eight -meter waterfronts were constructed on the soft soil of agricultural soil, which is susceptible to weakness. The weight of the waterfront exceeded the soil capacity, which caused it to join and failed. “Weight was more than five times what the soil could safely manage,” said Mr. Menon.
According to him, the collapse was prevented. Proper land testing in the planning phase would identify weak clay layers, which would allow redesign or other safety measures to avoid potential collapse. “The soil investigation seems to have been insufficient or incomplete, or the results were ignored or misinterpreted,” he said.
Mr. Menon said that infrastructure projects in Kerala were often plagued by inconsistent application of scientific engineering procedures, including the use of the same methods of soil investigation for roads and buildings despite their different requirements and neglecting long -term effects as land settlement.
Mr. Menon said that outdated methods of investigation and proposal were still used and relied on prerequisites rather than on data -based proposals and on site.
He said that the Koriyad incident should stimulate a nationwide review of similar sections with high high -rise road assessment of thorough geotechnical risks. According to him, the emphasis should be strongly engaged in the extraction of technical lessons and solutions from this failure than to assign guilt.
Published – May 22, 2025 9:16
