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Not an isolated incident
This is what one of my friends at LSR had to say about the mishap at Metro Station
yep rt in front of college!we'v been walkin under that darned thing fer a yr now... the level idioticness in this place never ceases to amaze me!!
no one could care a sweet damn!
its all about dead lines!
I said to myself - Well, this isn't new. Keeps happening at construction sites. Delhi metro has an excellent track record. One shouldn't be blaming Delhi metro for one odd incident.
She goes on to say
dude this happened during the asian games run up as well!!2 flyover collapses!!:P
Again I think - nothing new. 96 people had died during the construction of the Hoover dam at Las Vegas. 5609 people died during the construction of the Panama canal.
DMRC head Sreedharan had resigned from his post and the Delhi government had rejected his resignation.
Looked like the DMRC had played its cards right and all will be well.
Then comes the second blow.
In what appeared to have been a case of negligence, the news channels flash the video of three cranes toppling over unable to take the weight of a beam at the same time.
I reconcile myself again - happens.
The first suicide at Kgp didn't stop the second suicide. One incident of racial abuse in Australia didn't stop more incidents. One tends to repeat things.
Uncertainty Principle
Moreover, scientifically speaking events cannot be predicted with complete accuracy: there is always a degree of uncertainty. If you may like, you may ascribe the randomness to God.
But science has redefined its goals: the aim being to formulate laws that enables them to predict events only up to the limit set by the uncertainty principle.
[This is how Stephen Hawking describes the aims of science in his highly acclaimed book A Briefer History of Time]
Then I wake up next morning.
A third incident has happened at Mumbai - again concerning the Metro. A steel scaffolding had collapsed.
This sets me to thinking - could this be randomness?
Can we ascribe it to the uncertainty principle?
Certainly not.
Moreover, all the three incidents involved Gammon India. Was it merely chance?
Certainly not.
Is Gammon India culpable?
I won't pass a verdict - because I haven't investigated the incidents. Nevertheless, the sequence of events do raise suspicions.
There is enough reason to believe that the circumstances that led to such an incidents demands that the engineers didn't stick to the right procedures.
Can engineering excellence be sacrificed at the cost of meeting deadlines?
Certainly not.
The Delhi Metro which has an excellent track record needs to keep in mind that what they call %errors in experiments can become a question of life and death for some.
Avoidable?
The first mishap may not have been avoidable. The second may not have been avoidable. But three is one too many.
It makes one believe that all three incidents were avoidable.
4 comments
It makes one believe that all three incidents were avoidable. Truly, I agree.
On lighter nodes, may be u shd treat the problem using probability theory in place of uncertainity principle :P
Right. This is what we call sigularities in Mathematics.
That is when the data doesn't fit the theory. Then we have to modify our theory. When there were 3 incidents, the uncertainty principle theory didn't fit. That made me believe that all three incidents were avoidable.
@Geetika and Mainak:
Or maybe each incident is like a linear independent vector and cannot be described in terms of other vectors.(incidents)
Guys you are going crazy!
I think the first incident deserved being criticized and looked at,but the other ones were just overemphasized by the media because of the first one.Incidents like the other two happen very frequently .
@Piyush: You do have a point here. Things do happen at construction venues. There is nothing new in it.
The media did overemphasize things. That is why I didn't bother much till I came to know of the 3rd incident. It really made me wonder if the Delhi Metro was sacrificing engineering excellence to meet deadlines.
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