“God’s will” is how one of the accused in the Gujarat Morbi bridge collapse catastrophe – in which 135 people died – described the tragedy to an Indian court.
Deepak Parekh, a manager of the Oreva company in charge of maintaining the 150-year-old Morbi bridge, made the remark. He is one of the nine persons arrested when the bridge collapsed on Sunday (October 30, 2022), NDTV reported.
“… Bhagwan ki ichcha (will of God) that such an unfortunate event happened,” he informed Chief Judicial Magistrate MJ Khan.
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PA Zala, Morbi Deputy Superintendent of Police, testified in court that the Morbi bridge’s cable was “rusted” and had not been replaced by the business that restored it.
On October 26, the Morbi bridge was reopened to traffic without any official review or quality control. “As part of maintenance and repair, only the platform was changed. The bridge was on a cable and no oiling or greasing of the cable was done. From where the cable broke, the cable was rusted. Had the cable been repaired, the incident would not have happened,” the police official was quoted in the NDTV report.
The contractors that repaired the collapsed Morbi bridge in Gujarat, according to a prosecutor, were unqualified to maintain public infrastructure. According to the prosecutor: “Despite that, these contractors were given repair work of the bridge in 2007 and then in 2022.”