Lack of maintenance and ageing are suspected to be the reason for sudden collapse of the about 80-year-old bus hangar at Gowliguda in the city on Thursday at 7.20 a.m. “Last Friday, two of the iron columns at the rear of the building showed a slight bend. We immediately evacuated the site and shifted the booking counter and closed the snacks counter. On Sunday, a wall was erected at the rear of the structure and the front portion was fenced off. Today morning, there was a crackling sound and big plume of dust rose in the air as the whole hangar caved in,” said Prakash Rao of Telangana State Road Transport Corporation, who was standing just outside the structure, and ran out.
Hub of operations
The column-free hangar was among the first to be imported into India and had a steel frame manufactured by Mississippi Valley Structural Steel Company and the cladding was manufactured by Butler and Co of Galesburg, Illinois. The bus hangar on the edge of the River Musi was a hub of transport for the Nizam State Railways and Road Transport Department which began with a fleet of 27 buses with 25-seater capacity in 1932. By 1942, the fleet had grown to 256 buses including 111 Albion 27-seater buses. The Gowliguda bus station remained the hub of operations for the Nizam’s road transport network supplementing the railway network till the inauguration of the Ranigunj depot much after Independence and creation of Andhra Pradesh. Though the bus station was a landmark, it gradually lost importance as other bus depots were opened. Consequently, maintenance too declined over the time.
Seeing the photographs of the rusted cladding and the steel frame that appeared cracked like a twig, two professors of engineering squarely blamed it on lack of maintenance. “This is just lack of maintenance. Steel is coated with zinc so that the wear and tear remains at the superficial level and can be acted upon. Corrosion is like cancer; it races through the material in the absence of maintenance. And this was on the banks of the River Musi which is a damp area,” said P.V.S. Lakshminarayana of the metallurgy department in Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology.
Metal fatigue
“Metal fatigue coupled with lack of maintenance played a key role. The crack at the joint of the steel column that buckled clearly indicates that. The load on the columns didn’t increase overnight. There must have been steady corrosion that remained unchecked leading to this crash,” says Arkanti Krishnaiah of Osmania University.
Incidentally, the similarly built Gulfport Mississipi hangar in the U.S. was restored in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina at the cost of $ 2.4 million in 2015.
