Morbi Bridge Update: Owners of Company 'Missing'
As per our latest sources, the owners of the company who were assigned to renovate the Morbi Bridge, which collapsed in Gujarat, a few days back are missing.
ISH News had released a video about the Morbi Bridge that collapsed. More than 130 people had died.
https://ish.news/yt-31-10-2022_1
A video had gone viral of people standing in the middle of the bridge and jumping. The cable bridge in Morbi -- nearly 150 years old and a popular tourist spot -- was closed for seven months for renovation. It was reopened to the public on October 26, the Gujarati New Year. Oreva Group was responsible for the renovation of the bridge. Now the Morbi Municipality has said that Oreva Group was responsible for the renovations, Oreva Group was supposed to give renovation details to the municipality and the municipality was going to do a quality check. However the group never gave and details and opened the bridge to the public. Now the company said that the bridge collapsed because people in the middle were jumping and moving the bridge from side to side. Two managers of the Oreva Group, two sub-contractors and Five other men were arrested, including security guards and ticket booking clerks. Everyone is in jail. An investigation revealed that the floor of the bridge was replaced but its 150-year-old old cables were not. The weight of the bridge had increased due to four-layered aluminum sheets used in the flooring and the cables couldn't support it. Oreva allegedly outsourced the work to a little-known contractor. The contractors who carried out the bridge repairs were not qualified for such work. So the main question is where are the owners of Oreva Group?
Oreva's Managing Director Jaysukhbhai Patel, who had publicly claimed that the renovated bridge will hold up for at least eight to ten years, has not been seen since the tragedy. The Oreva company's farmhouse in Ahmedabad is locked and abandoned, with not even a security guard in sight. Mr Patel was last seen, along with his family, at the reopening of the bridge on October 26. He had signed the contract with the Morbi municipal corporation. The Oreva company bagged a 15-year deal to maintain the bridge in March. The Morbi municipal body allegedly awarded the contract to Oreva without a bidding process. The agreement did not even mention any requirement of a fitness certificate before the bridge was opened to the public.
The survivors of the tragedy and the opposition have questioned why the police FIR doesn't name either the top bosses of Oreva or the civic officials who signed the contract despite glaring gaps. Opposition parties and locals have accused the state government of sparing the main accused and making scapegoats out of security guards, ticket sellers and lower level employees of Oreva. Lawyers have refused to represent any of the accused, in a reflection of rising public anger. So who is at fault? Oreva Group? The Morbi Municipality? Or both? Let us know your views in the comments. In another incident no lessons were learnt post-Morbi bridge accident: Tourists from Maharashtra were seen driving a car on a suspension bridge at Yellapura town Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka.
