A concrete beam from an under construction stretch of the Mass Rapid Transit System (MRTS) crashed in Chennai on Thursday, January 18. The incident occurred at an MRTS construction site at the southern stretch of the Inner Ring Road at Thillai Ganga Nagar near Adambakkam at around 6pm. No injuries were reported since the beam crashed inside the barricaded portion of the site.

B Guganesan, Chief Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the Southern Railway, told the media that the accident took place due to the failure of a lifting jack. While launching the 40 m concrete beam using hydraulic jacks to place it on the elevated alignment, the lifting jack failed and the concrete beam slipped and crashed, Guganesan said. Since traffic had been diverted and the place was barricaded, no injuries or public damages were reported, he added.

The collapsed concrete beam was meant for installing the tracks for MRTS trains. The beam will be removed soon, the Railway PRO said. 

The on-going construction at Thillai Ganga Nagar comes under the MRTS’s phase II project that is aiming to connect Velachery in the south of Chennai to St Thomas Mount station, a locality close to the Chennai International Airport, over a stretch of five kilometres. Although this project was launched 16 years ago in 2008, construction work began in 2021, due to land acquisition issues on the 500 m stretch between Adambakkam and St Thomas Mount.