THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Vehicles of all kinds, be it two, three, four or six-wheelers, all line up before the 112-year-old steel-suspended Kundamonkadavu Bridge in a well-disciplined manner. Wait; they are not showering veneration on the more-than-a-century-old bridge on the Thiruvananthapuram- Kattakkada route. Once the bridge carries more than the recommended nine tonnes of weight, the Karamana river passing underneath may witness some untoward incident. So they keep waiting for minutes for the vehicles from the opposite side to pass through. Vehicles passing side by side through the precarious bridge has almost stopped owing to the bad condition of the bridge. “The bridge lacks enough width to give way for vehicles coming from either side at the same time. The lining up of the vehicles is a common sight here,” says Prasannakumar K S, who resided at Pallimukku. The question that arises here is whether the bridge is equipped to face an emergency situation in the locality. In case of an emergency, the next best solution is to take the Thirumala- Mangattukadavu- Thachottukavu route to reach the destination. This will consume more time and distance. Unnikrishnan, who works with the nearby rod-cement depot, remembers an incident, “when a fire broke out near Peyad, a fire-engine was trapped in the traffic snarl here for nearly half-an-hour. Who will answer if the same happens with an ambulance in an emergency?” he asks. So as to know how fragile the bridge is, one just needs to take a walk through it when a fully-loaded transport bus or lorry passes through it. The bridge will start trembling. “Fearing this situation, many of us depend on an autorickshaw just for the sake of crossing the bridge,” says Aji Kumar V, who resides nearby. Sanal Kumar B and Krishnan Nair, who also work at the depot, say that lorries laden with timber, steel rods, gas cylinders and huge water pipes passing through the bridge at night is nothing new. Many a time, some of them will cross the limit of the recommended capacity of the bridge. They pointed out that deploying cops in the area too goes in vain in such situations. When contacted, Valiyavila ward councillor Radha N she said that with the assistance of NABARD, construction of a new bridge across the Karamana river adjacent to the present one will begin by March 2012. The councillor said that there are traffic guards deployed every day to monitor the situation. But City Express did not even see even one on Sunday morning!
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