Carnac Bridge to rise 10 yrs after unsafe tag

MUMBAI: Carnac Bridge, one the first bridges built across railway tracks in the country, is only a few months from being reopened to traffic, in a brand new avatar. The new bridge will be inaugurated on June 10, more than a decade after this east-west connector in South Mumbai was declared unsafe.

Before it was brought down in a cascade of debris and sparks, holding up rail traffic on the Central Railway for a colossal 27 hours in November 2022, the project languished for years with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC).

It was in 2014 that the then 146-year-old bridge was declared unsafe and was shut to heavy vehicles. While an audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) later revealed that work orders had been issued in 2017, work had not actually begun, leading to cost escalation losses.

The civic body only started work on the new bridge in 2018, after the Gokhale bridge mishap in Andheri, which triggered a string of audits of the city’s bridges by IIT-Bombay. This brought the Carnac Bridge back into focus – only to recede from the BMC’s radar once more. It was briefly shut to traffic and then reopened.

It took another four years for the BMC to secure the traffic NOC needed for work on Carnac Bridge to get off the ground. The NOC was given only after traffic was allowed back on another South Mumbai bridge, Hancock Bridge.

The bridge’s demolition started in November 2022. It took 50 gas cutters, four large-capacity cranes, more than 500 people to pull apart the steel girders that held up the bridge. But the 19-month deadline was soon found to be ambitious. The BMC’s roads department complained of non-availability of land due to unauthorised structures on both sides of the bridge, even though it had years to sort things out.

“On the west side, there was a jhunka bhakar kendra, a gymnasium, a Shiva temple, BEST substation and Pydhonie traffic police chowki,” said an official from the BMC’s roads department. “On the east was another Pydhonie traffic police chowki, a toilet block, a portion of a ROTA printing press, hutments, along with water mains, old sewer mains and storm water drains, and BEST power cables. We had to send repeated reminders to the civic A and B wards to get them cleared.”

Railway permissions took the BMC till October 2024 to get set for a crucial phase of the bridge’s reconstruction: the shifting into place of the massive 550-tonne girders. More railway blocks followed.

In January 2025, when the second, 400-tonne girder was being slid into place, there was a near-mishap – the gigantic structure was suspended, mid-air, by the cables of a crane for hours. The Central Railway blamed the BMC for not being adequately prepared. The railway block had to be extended and a worker was injured. The work was completed at night, 48 hours later.

With pressure from the chief minister to complete the project, the BMC now claims it is “on track” for the bridge’s opening before the monsoon.