Residents of Washermanpet in Chennai were greeted to a strange and disgusting sight on Thursday, as huge amounts of sludge suddenly bubbled forth onto a street in the area.
The sewage water not only flowed over the street but also entered ground floor rooms of houses on Muthai Street, where the Chennai metro authorities are building a tunnel 20 feet below the surface.
Reacting to the incident, the Chennai Metro PR spokesperson said that an investigation was underway on how the sludge found its way into the street.
The spokesperson blamed the incident on a borewell dug by a local resident of which the authorities were not informed. The spokesperson said residents had been asked to inform the agency before starting any construction work in the area.
“There was a borewell dug and abandoned, which we were not informed about while the tunnel was being constructed by us. During instrumentation, monitoring and while doing surveys, we always ask residents to inform us about borewells, but at this point, we do not have any idea how the sludge came out,” spokesperson said.
“At the moment, an investigation is going on. The problem is the owner never informed us about the sludge. Now we have begun clearing the sludge and are inspecting what caused it. Only after inspection we can say what caused the sludge,” spokesperson added.
There have been multiple incidents of road cave-ins and surface damage that have been attributed to the ongoing metro construction work.
The latest incident comes less than 10 days after huge cracks appeared in the road surface on Anna Salai.
Just two days before that, a public bus and a car fell into a huge crater that appeared nearby.