City roads in bad shape

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Almost all roads in the capital have turned into patchworks of potholes and craters due to substandard construction and torrential rain.

Acknowledging that all roads in the city have literally become impassable, Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) officials claimed that they are trying to repair those.

“We started repairing the roads three or four months ago and now we have increased the volume of work…but as you can see the heavy downpour is hampering the work,” said a DCC official.

City residents are however quite dissatisfied with the band-aid measures taken by the DCC. Anwar Ali, a city resident, said, “I simply don’t understand why road repair works are kept pending each year till the monsoon. The potholes will reappear in two or three months!”

During spot visits, innumerable potholes were seen on the roads stretching from Sayedabad to Kanchpur, from Juraiin to Pagla via Postogola, and on Darussalam Road in Mirpur.

Similar conditions are also plaguing the roads of Uttara, Rampura, Malibagh, Purana Paltan, Naya Paltan, Gabtoli, Mugda, Khilgaon, Bashabo, Mothertek, Goran, Kochukhet, and Mirpur-14 areas.

Drivers of buses, private cars, and human-haulers were seen struggling to avoid gaping ditches which started as potholes in section no 6 of Uttara and on Mazar Road that goes to the Town Protection Embankment.

With the onset of monsoons, different utility service providers including Desa, Wasa, Titas and private mobile phone operating companies dig into the roads and use inadequate amounts of materials to fill up the trenches they create. As a result in only a couple of months the roads once again become rugged, an example of which was very clearly visible on the road stretching from Azampur of Uttara to Maddhya Badda.

Executive Engineer of DCC Zone-10 Monsur Ahmed told The Daily Star that the corporation is trying to repair the roads while the dangerous potholes-turned-craters at Abdullahpur crossing in Uttara somehow went unnoticed by them.

“I have already sent a letter to the roads and highways department for repairing the road…I have attached a photo published in your newspaper with it too. Road accidents there might become fatal,” he said.

The Daily Star published a photograph of Abdullahpur crossing on Sunday, which showed craters filled with water occupying almost a half of the road while buses were staying on a narrow lane towards the other side of the road in an effort to avoid falling in those craters.

When asked, a number of engineers, preferring anonymity, said substandard construction of roads is responsible to some extent for the dire situation of the roads in the capital.

They however added that the construction contractors should not always be blamed, rather it is the system that should be blamed. The price of bitumen is Tk 5,000 a drum now, but they are instructed to estimate the price at only Tk 3,100. As a result, the contractors have to make do with less than required amounts of materials.

The wearing surface of the roads inside the city is designed to be nine inches thick with the capacity to bear only a limited load of up to 5 tons, but in the absence of a monitoring system, heavily loaded trucks with even up to 20 tons of load are plying through the city roads, and that is one of the reasons for quick deterioration of the roads, said the engineers. The DCC engineers urged for immediate installation of four weighing stations at Aminbazar, Jatrabari, Tongi and Pagla for restricting movements of heavily loaded vehicles through the city.

Dr Shamimuzzaman Basunia, professor of the civil engineering department of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), told The Daily Star, “For proper construction of roads you must ensure the quality of work at all levels including the wearing surface, base, sub-base and sub-grate levels. As the constructions are not done properly, the roads fail to survive heavy rainfalls.”

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