An inordinate delay in awarding river training work (RTW) for the planned Padma Bridge has posed a fresh threat to protection of river banks along the country's longest bridge.
Sources said the Bangladesh Bridge Authority (BBA), the implementing agency of the Padma Multipurpose Bridge Project, is now under pressure to protect the Mawa site of the bridge as they faced unusual erosion at the site last year.
As the Mawa Ghat erosion protection work is yet to start, they said, the authority is worried about facing further erosion along the Mawa bank during the coming monsoon.
"If the RTW was awarded, it would have been the headache of the firm awarded the contract for river bank protection. But now we have to handle the unusual situation within a lot of limitations," said an official preferring not to be named.
Since the Mawa Ghat erosion, the BBA has taken measures to give the river protection work to the Water Development Board (WDB) and chalked a 1.3 km work beyond the Mawa site RTW. The work, however, is yet to start due to various reasons.
The BBA could not complete the selection process of the RTW as the project faced allegations of corruption conspiracy by the World Bank in 2011. Though the authority has completed the short listing process of the work, it was halted due to fresh crisis of fund after all foreign financiers withdrew their funding.
The BBA finally called the short-listed firms to submit the technical proposal in November which is yet to be evaluated. The BBA officials said there would be two months more to select the contractor for the RTW.
During the last one year, the BBA held a series of meetings with the WDB and the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority to shift the age-old Mawa Ghat and took the decision to use the expertise of the Board to protect the river banks on an urgent basis.
But due to bureaucratic complications and fund-related uncertainty, the work could not be started during peak time of the work, the officials added. Experts said erosion protection work should be done between November and April.
Officials said the Padma bridge site between Mawa and Janjira was chosen by the project's foreign consultants in 2010 after watching the morphology of the Padma river during the last two to three centuries.
As the river flow at the Mawa site was found more stable than the Janjira side, the experts designed 1.5 km RTW at the Mawa site and 12km on the other site to ensure flowing of the river below the 6.15 km bridge for the next 100 years, they added.
However, the officials said, due to delay in starting the Padma bridge RTW, the Mawa site faced the unusual erosion last year. This ultimately threatened the Mawa Ghat, which was 700 metre upstream of the bridge site.
Meanwhile, the Centre for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) in a report to the BBA apprehends continuation of river erosion this year due to change of unexpected river flow.
Sources said though the additional river protection work has not been included in the project proposal, the authority, however, decided to fund the work from the project using the local expertise.
Ainun Nishat, a member of the panel of experts of the Padma bridge project, said the Mawa site RTW of the Padma bridge was taken depending on 200 to 250 years of findings. He said erosion happened in natural way.
"No one could realise that the erosion at the Mawa site would start before the bridge construction work begins," he told the FE over phone.
The BBA has already faced erosion at the construction yard at Janjira side in 2012. Though an emergency protection work was awarded to a Bangladesh-India joint firm, it has yet to be completed.
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