The Frontier Works Organisation (FWO) has said the defect that recently surfaced in the newly launched portion of the M-9 motorway between Karachi and Hyderabad was caused mainly by a slow movement of overloaded goods’ vehicles, and vowed that such issues would be avoided in future by imposing a strict load management regime for goods’ carriers as well as by building a permanent toll plaza near Hyderabad.
Speaking at a press briefing at the Nooriabad camp office of the organisation on Tuesday, the chief executive officer of Score (the subsidiary project company of the FWO building the M-9), Brig (retd) Tahir Siddiqui, said the recently reported “localised failure” had been observed near the Lonikot temporary toll plaza with an approximate length of 400 metres, which was around 0.25 percent area of the built portion of the M-9 project.
He said these kinds of road failures were termed “rutting” in civil engineering and they were usually caused by heavy/overloaded but slow vehicular traffic.
Required tests and coring had been carried out to investigate the cause of this failure, he said, adding that as per the requirement, the rectification of patch had already been completed.
No extra money was being claimed from the National Highway Authority or any other government institution for carrying out these rectification works, he said.
Brig Siddiqui said length of the project was 136 kilometres, out of which 120 kilometres would be the motorway section and 16 kilometres would be an urbanised portion.
There will be eight new inter-changes while two existing inter-changes along M-9 will be rehabilitated. Also, a service road with a length of 185 kilometres on both sides will be constructed.
For the FWO, the project is not only limited to construction but includes operations and routine maintenance for 25 years (till 2040), which includes two periodic/major maintenance.
The project commenced in October 2015 and is supposed to be completed in 30 months (by April 2018). However, the FWO targets to compote the project by August 2017.
Brig Siddiqui said the sole purpose of expediting the construction work for the early completion of the project was to reduce inconvenience to commuters.
The M-9 project is being built on a BOOT (build, operate, own and transfer) basis. The FWO won the contract for constructing the highway through a competitive bidding process. The overall construction cost of the project is Rs37 billion, with the FWO injecting 30 percent of the finances as its equity share while 70 percent had been borrowed from a consortium of local banks, which would be returned through toll revenue.
The CEO of the project company told journalists that the toll being collected during the construction phase of the project was being utilised for the construction and partially for debt-servicing. Not only this, for the first 10 years, a major chunk of the toll fee would be used for debt repayment and the remaining would be used for operation, maintenance, and management costs. After debt-servicing (for 10 years), a sizeable share from toll collections would be remitted to the NHA and would be utilized for other infrastructure projects in the country.
Earlier, members of a media delegation visited the trauma centre and the public school being operated by the FWO at Dumba Goth off the under-construction motorway.
The 18-bedded trauma centre has been functioning round the clock with two ambulances and providing free treatment to persons injured in traffic accidents on the Super Highway and in the adjoining areas.
The trauma centre has been providing emergency medical treatment to people getting injured in road accidents on the Super Highway and the M-9 section of the motorway. Apart from this trauma centre, there is no such health facility and emergency cases have to be shifted to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, miles away in the centre of the city.
The school and the trauma centre are spread over eight acres. The school has a strength of over 270 students up to Class 8th, while very soon it would be upgraded to secondary classes. The school gives special incentives to children of underprivileged children from nearby rural settlements to get quality education. A similar trauma centre is being established by the FWO near Nooriabad Industrial Estate.