Poor lateral support led to metro pier crash in Bengaluru: Report

A team of professors from the civil engineering department of IIT Hyderabad, commissioned by the Bengaluru City Police to identify the causes for an under-construction metro pier crashing and killing a woman and her toddler son in HBR Layout on January 10, has found that the lateral support provided to keep the structure intact was inadequate.

A source privy to the developments in the investigation told DH, “The reinforcement cage should have been restrained at multiple locations along its height using guy wires (cables that hold a structure in place). But the restraint system anchoring the guy wires to concrete blocks was inadequate. The reinforcement cage was an unstable structure with inadequate lateral restraints and thus collapsed.”