No more flooding in Kalina!

For 20-odd years, residents of Kalina’s Sunder Nagar were faced with the prospect of their homes flooding every monsoon.

But by 2011, the flooding problem in Kalina will be a thing of the past, with the civic body planning to install a micro-tunnel machine in the area.

The project took off last week, and once the 1,000 mm diameter micro-tunnelling and pipe-jacking project costing Rs25 crore is operational, water-logging in the area will be minimised. “The area around Kolovery Village would pump out sewage which would enter a manhole in front of our street on Sunder Nagar. Water used to come out from that manhole and enter our buildings,” said Gurvinder Singh Putiani from Sunder Nagar.

Rain water and sewage water from Kalina will flow into the micro-tunnel, which will join the huge tunnel at the Western Express Highway and finally flush out into sea. The proposed length of the micro-tunnel is 2.1 km, with a depth of 30 ft, and it will connect to the Kherwadi pumping station.

“We are enlarging the capacity of the sewer lines to avoid flooding due to dancing manholes (that wobble after reaching the overflow mark) at Sunder Nagar. Residents living in areas between the Western Express Highway and Kalina pumping
station will be hugely benefited,” said G Rathod, assistant engineer, H-East ward.

“Work is being done in an unsystematic way by contractors and this technology isn’t convincing. There is a 30 ft pit and children had narrowly escaped falling in recently,” said Krishna Kurup, another resident from Sunder Nagar.

What is micro-tunnelling?
Micro-tunnelling is a technique to install a pipe to a pre-determined line and level by remote control of the cutting head. The equipment is relatively new on the tunnelling scene. Research in micro-tunnelling was aimed at increasing sewer services in large cities.