The damaged roads of the city will be fixed by Tuesday, a senior engineer of the civic body said on Saturday.
A senior official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) said they had already started fixing roads.
The ongoing work is part of temporary repairs or patchwork, meant primarily to fill potholes. The work does not involve a complete overlay of roads.
“We repaired many roads, or at least stretches of them, on Saturday. The teams worked overnight. We will keep up the repair work for the next few days,” the engineer said.
“We will try to fix the roads by Tuesday, provided it does not rain in the next few
days. We were waiting for a dry phase to do repairs. It rained so much in the last week that we could not start the work.”
Sources in the KMC said repairs had been undertaken on stretches of EM Bypass, Diamond Harbour Road, Jawaharlal Nehru Road, Burdwan Road, CIT Road, Amherst Street, James Long Sarani, and AJC Bose Road, among others.
The Telegraph reported on Saturday that several roads in the city had started breaking after the rains in the last week.
Stretches of the Park Circus Connector and multiple stretches of EM Bypass were battered. Stretches of Judges Court Road are also in
poor condition, said a Behala resident.
Either the top surfaces have worn off or they are pockmarked with craters. Calcutta’s roads have the infamy of undulating surfaces. The potholes have made them worse.
Residents complained that commuting is risky. For pedestrians, especially the elderly, walking on such roads is fraught with danger.
“We conducted the repairs on Friday night. We will do so on Saturday night, Sunday night and Monday night so that we can complete all repairs before Tuesday,” said the engineer.
The stretch of EM Bypass on the northern slope of the Baghajatin rail overbridge near Hiland Park may not be repaired now. The KMC engineer said the stretch had some drainage issues that had to be fixed first.
“The stretch is getting waterlogged after the rain. This is causing the top surface to wear off and potholes are forming. The drainage issue has to be fixed before we repair the road,” said the engineer.
Many commuters told The Telegraph on Friday that a 70m stretch of EM Bypass was so bad that passengers of buses or cars found it difficult to cross. Vehicles had to slow down so much that a long queue formed. On Thursday, the queue of vehicles had crossed 500 metres. A commuter said it took him 40 minutes to cross Hiland Park from the Patuli crossing. “Once I crossed that stretch, there were no snarls,” said the
commuter.
The KMC engineer said they were pouring a hot bituminous mixture over the potholes to fill them. “These are temporary repairs,” said the engineer.
The KMC usually undertakes thorough repairs of roads in the winter.