Alipurduar, April 20: The wooden planks of a bridge on NH31 caved in today, stopping traffic to Falakata and forcing Siliguri-bound vehicles from Alipurduar and Cooch Behar to take long detours that cost them at least an hour extra.

PWD engineers said they would need around two days to repair the Shishargore bridge over the Madhya Torsha. Around 200 goods and passenger vehicles and 5,000 commuters travel through this stretch of the national highway everyday.

This morning, the planks gave in moments after a loaded truck crossed the bridge, said residents of the area. It blocked the route completely.

As a result, vehicles bound for Siliguri from Cooch Behar started plying via Mathabhanga, a 35km detour. Those from Alipurduar travelled around 40km extra to take NH31C via Hasimara and Birpara.

Engineers and workers of the PWD’s NH-II division arrived at the spot soon after the incident and started repairs.

Nirmal Mandal, the executive engineer of the division, said: “We will have to stop traffic for at least 48 hours to repair the bridge.”

The Shishargore bridge is one of four wooden bridges in the Falakata section of NH31, highlighting the fragility of connectivity through this road. “It is just ridiculous,” Bishnu Pada Sarkar, a resident of the area, said. “Very often, vehicles stop plying over the Shishargore bridge for hours on end. For the past one decade, the four bridges are lying in poor condition but nobody cares. A big accident is just waiting to happen and quite a few lives could be lost.”

The executive engineer of the PWD’s NH-II division, which is in charge of the highway’s maintenance, had his own argument. “We have put up boards in front of every weak bridge to say it is off-limits for trucks carrying more than 10 tonnes of goods. However, if vehicles carrying as much as twice that weight cross the bridges, what can we do?” Mandal asked.

This is not the first time that the demand for new, concrete bridges has been raised. In December 2002, Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had inaugurated the Shil Torsha bridge over the Torsha on the same route and declared that the four wooden bridges would be converted to concrete ones soon. However, nothing came of that promise.

Later, it was decided that the stretch would be part of the East-West Corridor — a four lane highway connecting Porbander in Gujarat to Silchar in Assam — and the new bridges would come up as part of the project.

However, there has been little progress in the East-West Corridor project in the past one year.