Bangladesh News

The Third Buriganga Bridge at Basila has been built at least two meters below its vertical clearance requirement, seriously undermining the river’s navigability and flouting contractual prerequisite.

By building the bridge at the lower height, the officials involved in the construction of the bridge, which was approved in October 2003 and will be completed in 2010, have siphoned off several crores of taka, said sources.

The Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development donated Tk 49 crore required for the construction of the 2,300 feet long and 33 feet wide Third Buriganga Bridge.

Concerns over the height of the bridge first came to light during this year’s rainy season when Basila residents witnessed many vessels suffering difficulties in passing under the bridge.

Vessels, which had unloaded their merchandise at Mirpur and Amin Bazar, could navigate under the bridge only when they filled their hulls with water sinking the boats lower than usual.

Threatened with the risk of their business turning non-lucrative, owners of larger vessels lodged complaints expressing their concern over the vertical clearance of the bridge.

As a result, a team of hydrograph experts from Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA) measured both the river’s water level and the height of the bridge from water level and found that it was only 13.2 metres instead of the required 15.2 metres.

Director of the Third Buriganga Bridge Project, Additional Chief Engineer of the Roads and Highways Department Faruque Ahmed, however, denied flouting the official height requirement and said the BIWTA officials have no right to measure the height of an under-construction bridge without prior permission of the project officials.

“They [BIWTA officials] have no idea about which navigation span of the bridge had to be measured for establishing the vertical clearance. We have constructed the bridge as per the terms and conditions of the project,” he told The Daily Star.

BIWTA hydrographers, who measured the height of the bridge last week, said they had measured the vertical distance throughout the span of the bridge and found the range of clearance was between 7.9 and 8.53 meters when at the current level of the river it should have been 10.5 metres.

The BIWTA officials said the contract requires the contractors to build the bridge at an even higher level. “We are now sure that the height requirement of the bridge has been badly negotiated and it will create big problems during flood when the government starts operating the circular waterway,” said a BIWTA official, requesting anonymity.

As the floods increase the water level of the river, the vertical height clearance between the water and the bridge will decline.

The Bangladesh-China Friendship Bridge on Buriganga was built at a 40-metre height from water level while the Second Buriganga Bridge was built at 25 metres height.

The Dhaka Circular Waterway project combines river ways of Buriganga, Turag, Balu and Shitalakhya and projects to establish a route that would help ease city’s traffic congestion. In the first phase of the project, the government dredged the rivers and installed landing stations over an area of about 30 kilometres along the rivers. The second phase of the project is now underway.

Locals and an engineer of the contractor Mir Akhtar Hossain Ltd told The Daily Star that several components of the project were revised because of complications arising from land acquisition. But they said those revisions had nothing to do with the height of the bridge.

A former engineer of the Roads and Highways Department, who supervised constructions of several bridges, said negotiating height and width of bridges, which usually goes unnoticed, means corruption. “This is a practice that could save the people at the top engineering level of the project a lot of money,” he said.

According to insiders, several bridges built elsewhere in the country will impede future navigability forever because of their low height. On the planned circular waterway, officials are already struggling with the vertical clearance of at least half a dozen bridges.

“Until we redesign these bridges and raise their heights we do not know how to run the circular waterway project,” said an official of the Dhaka Circular Waterway Project.