Polavaram: Placing of world's biggest girders on spillway begins

Polavaram: With the launching of placing the world's biggest girders on the 45 and 46 blocks of the spillway at the multipurpose Polavaram project on Monday, the construction of the project has reached a vital turning point for completing the project before the deadline, claims Megha Engineering and Infrastructures Limited in a statement here on Monday.

Each of the girders weighing about 62 tonnes, a total of 196 girders would be placed on the piers of the 1.054 km long spillway with the help of a massive crane of 200 tonnes capacity, it said.

A Satish Babu, General Manager of MEIL says that it would take two months to complete the placement of the girders. "This is one of the vital turning points in completing the project before the deadline," he said. At present 110 girders of the total 196 are ready to be erected. Nearly 25 cubic metres of concrete is used to cast each girder.

Executive engineers P Adi Reddy and K Balakrishna Murthy, DEs K Mallikarjuna and Rameswar Naidu and R Laxman Rao were also present at the event.

The construction of 52 blocks of the spillway is nearing completion and if all the girders were erected the major part of the spillway would be completed, Satish Babu said.

Due to the pandemic, the pace of work lost its momentum for a while as the labour migrated to their native places, he recalled. "Now the labourers were brought back by offering them incentives and taking special permission from the State government," he said.

Referring to the work completed by the end of June, Satish Babu said that 1.11 lakh cubic metres of concrete work in spill channel,1.41 lakh cubic metres of concrete work in spillway, 3.10 lakh cubic metres of concrete work in Hydro-electric project, 1064 lakh cubic metres of earthwork, 1.14 lakh cubic metres of stone crushing and 10.64 lakh cubic metres of vibor-compaction work was completed.

He exuded confidence that the project work would be completed within the expected timeframe.