PRESS NOTE
Date : 25th June 2003
Venue: Belapur,
Navi Mumbai
On behalf of Konkan Railway workers and management I express deep condolences for all those passengers who lost their lives in the worst accident of its nature on the Konkan Railway on 22nd June 2003 of this month. The officially verified number of persons who lost their lives is 50. Earlier the 51 number was because of a body being counted twice in inter hospital transfers.
Current position
in :-
Total Causalities
Total Dead - 50
Grievous Injuries - 15
Minor Injuries - 10
******
Injured and Admitted in Hospital - 17
Injured and Discharged - 08
Details of Injured in various Hospitals
Oras (Sindhudurg) 07
Kankavali 04
Bambolim – Goa 05
KEM – Mumbai 01
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Total: - 17
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Within 30 to 40 mins of the accident senior officials with Doctors reached the site and all the injured passengers could be admitted in the near by hospitals at Oras, Sindhudurg-Kankavali for medical attention. Immediate ex-gratia payments of Rs.10,000/- was arranged for all injured and was enhanced to Rs.1 lac for the deceased and Rs.15,000 for the grievously injured.
The accident occurred at kms 278/09 in the approach of a 394 mts long Berle tunnel. In this approach cutting the worst side slope is on western side with broken rock formation and having half to one slope and is provided with the netting arrangement to take care of loose rock falls, but the eastern side had a very stable slope and was declared as a sound slope by a committee, including qualified geologist and experienced qualified engineers and hence was not considered vulnerable. It has also remained very stable in the last 8 years standing severe rainfalls.
In Konkan Railway all tunnel approach as well as other cuttings get regular annual inspections by Committee consisting of highly qualified and experienced engineering geologist, senior engineers and these recommendations are reviewed at a highest level of Chief Engineer and we have an elaborate policy of scientifically working out the degree of vulnerability classifying them and taking appropriate remedial steps which includes :-
0.1 Provision of steel nets
0.2 Rock bolting
0.3 Short creting
0.4 Provision of additional berms
0.5 Removal of overburden and easing out the slopes
0.6 Specially designed catch water drains
0.7 Micro-pilling
0.8 Soil nailing
0.9 Geomatting
Infact, this is a regular process and in the last 5 years we have been systematically inspecting and strengthening the slopes and rock cuttings in a scientific manner.
The Konkan Railway passes through a very difficult terrain and a stabilisation of these slopes is a special process.
The normal methods of patrolling which is adopted in other portions of Indian Railways which is basically influenced by the requirement to detect water levels rising over highest flood levels or danger levels or the track getting flooded or being washed out, are more relative to the adequacy or otherwise of the bridge opening which have been designed long years back.
In Konkan Railway we have taken special steps to design our infrastructure providing almost 2 to 3 times the water-ways and locating the line in such a way that flooding and washing out of track cannot happen. This involved extra expenditure at the time of construction, but permanent engineering solution is provided instead of adopting an administrative solution of men routinely patrolling the tracks.
The special peculiar problems of the Konkan coast required different solutions, unprecedented as seen from experienced of operating other parts of Indian Railways. The Corporation could respond to these engineering challenges. Some of the special features of Konkan Railway in this respect which are not available on conventional Railways and in other parts of India are :-
1. Very high level of qualified supervision starting from the grassroots. For the 760 kms we have 84 engineers holding diploma / engineering qualification, closely supervising the maintenance activity which again is looked after by literate qualified persons having ITI qualifications. In addition there are 22 section engineers who are engineering degree holders, who oversee their work. Nowhere in other Railways such intensive and qualified supervision is available.
2. Over this layer, the Corporation has got 5 Assistant / Senior Engineers with 2 Deputy Chief Engineers, for the section of 760 kms. Relatively this is a much more intensive supervision as compared to conventional railway system. Over and above to give guidance and run the railway system, on the infrastructure side of track, bridges and tunnels, we have in the HQrs dedicated senior engineering group consisting of 2 Senior engineers, 2 Deputy Chief Engineers and One Chief Engineer. The senior people are all from Indian Railway Service of Engineers, with established experience and competency. These Officers do only the Open line railway maintenance for Konkan Railway and they are not disturbed for any other projects.
There is a separate
project division who look after other interest of Konkan Railway Corporation which has 2
Chief Engineer rank persons, who also in case of necessity go and work on the Open Line
too. The Corporation had 30 surplus engineers
from the construction slope who constitute the bulk of project division and hence the
core responsibility of running and maintaining the Konkan Railway system is never
compromised.
The number of slip / boulder fall since the time Konkan Railway has been opened to traffic is under :
Year Boulder fall
1998-1999 172
1999-2000 194
2000-2001 153
2001-2002 69
2002-2003 47
2003-2004 32 Till today
During monsoon period about 200 patrolman are working on 8 hours shift duty with a day and night patrolling on scientifically identified vulnerable areas at a very high frequency unlike any conventional railways where only night patrolling is done. In Konkan Railway day and night patrolling is done, they are also equipped with the latest emergency telephones and they exchange private numbers from the specially provided emergency telephone socket every kilometer or half a kilometer along the route. The exchange of private numbers with the Station Masters and confirming the track is positively which happens every 15 to 20 mins. and that there is no obstruction on the track is necessary for the Station Master to allow any train to go further. In case Station Master does not receive this indication the speed of the train is automatically controlled.
Generally, this related to the rainfall and its intensity. The Corporation has the practice of annual inspections, analysis and taking the different remedial measures before the monsoon starts and again keeps continuously inspecting the sections during the entire monsoon for their behaviour so that we can take further remedial steps in the following monsoon season. This is a continuous process. The fact that over a period of 5 years the number of incidents have come down indicates that the solutions are working and the trend is positive. However, this year a well settled, accepted to be a stable slope which withstood all the previous rainfall, has suddenly given way which has led to this tragic accident. We are unable to accept that whatever textbooks and experts have given till now cannot be improved upon. The history of Konkan Railway cuttings and slopes clearly indicates that all prudent steps possible were taken which included special reviews by experts which included RDSO and report submitted to Ministry of Railways too. The entire documentation is available for ready reference, but the conventional solutions obviously do not suffice for the Konkan region.
A special infrastructure has been provided in terms of rail mounted vehicles which are self propelled, nine of them are provided in the system which is unique to Konkan Railway. These rail mounted vehicles have got complete equipment to restore rail fractures, special rock- splitters which can break the boulders without explosives and specially trained multi purpose track gang.
In fact the patrolling of Konkan Railway is more focussed on intensive and purposeful. It covers both day and night.
Konkan Railway on its own has to find the solution and will certainly take any suggestions given from the experts in this area. The latest experience has led us to believe that we have to install a predictive warning system based on the intensity of the rainfall worked out on the basis of centimeters per hour rain. As a matter of co-relation this year, we have discovered that it is not how much rain occurred on a day or a cumulative rainfall, but if over 3 to 4 hours period, the intensity is reaching the level of 3 to 5 cms per hour, there is a slight chance of some of the stable slopes getting disturbed. It is interesting that those, which were vulnerable areas earlier and were strengthened using the scientific method, remained unaffected while which we thought was stable got disturbed when such intense rainfalls have taken place this year.
As a long term measure we are planning to install two types of devices :
1) Any imminent movement of soil on the slope to be detected by an electronic pendulum system linked to the ACD technology, to pre-warn an approaching train sufficiently in advance and even stop the train or reduce the speed automatically.
2) Divide the region into 16 or 20 sample areas and provide a specially designed electronic rain gadget to monitor hourly intensity and again giving a feed into the ACD network which will have the knowledge to reduce the speeds to safe levels, once, the pre-determined bench mark intensity of rainfall reaches. Roughly from current experience 3 to 4 cms per hour seems to be the bench mark.
This effort may take
us 3 to 4 months, to complete but meantime as an immediate solution the following steps
are adopted.
IMMEDIATE STEPS:
Entire Konkan Railway is divided into 5 stretches in the following manner.
Section 1. Veer to Chiplun – 46.82 kms to 128 kms
Section 2 Chiplun to Ratnagiri – 128 km to 203 km
Section 3 Ratnagiri to Vaibhavadi Road – 204 km to 284 km
Section 4 Madgaon to Ankola – 442 km to 529 km
Section 5 Ankola to Bhatkal – 529 km to 610 km
Section 6 Bhatkal to Udupi – 610 km to 691 km
In each of these sections, we will be running a specially equipped locomotive with an engineering official provided with a cell phone which will be covering the solem section in one hour 15 minutes in each direction. The purpose of this single locomotive running up and down is that the entire track will get an engineering inspection for any obstruction or heavy rainfall atleast once in every two hours. This is in addition to all the patrolling and other systems which are already in position on date. Further to reduce delays in communication and improve probability of detecting and stopping a train in time, the entire communication system is further being augmental by providing cell phones to the locomotives running on the special engineering inspection cum monitoring as described above. Every Station Master covered in the above six sections, every rail mounted vehicle with emergency equipment which is in stand-by mode to move to a spot to remove obstruction also are covered.
Konkan Railway has already fitted ACD equipment at all the stations and the level crossing gates on the section from Madgaon to Roha. What is left out is the section from Madgaon to Thokur, once we provide the equipment in this section also and at about 60 to 70 locations additional monitoring towers based on ACD technology coupled with automatic electronic detection devices as described, will be having a long term solution to adequately warn and prevent any mishap on Konkan Railway.
We believe that we cannot truly fight the nature but it should be possible for us to study and understand the behaviour of nature so that maximum effort is made to prevent any loss of human life. We have set ourselves a six-month period to put in place a permanent solution.
Meantime, in terms of distribution of more than 100 cell phones in the system at all vulnerable and likely vulnerable locations, coupled with monitoring six locomotives and having nine RMV's on stand-by mode for any emergency will give us reasonable cover against any further risk in the current monsoon.
(B.Rajaram)
Managing Director
Konkan Railway Corporation