ecchelmet Driving safety at the Katni Grade
Separator Project
The complex 33.4 km Katni Grade Separator is fast taking shape, which when completed will be India’s longest railway grade separator and the second longest in Asia. Being executed by L&T GeoStructure, it will speed up freight traffic from the Singrauli–Katni (WCR) and Bilaspur – Katni (SECR) lines to the Katni–Bina line and improve distribution of the up-anddown traffic originating or arriving from the direction of Singrauli and Bilaspur in the east and Bina in the west.
Procuring RoW at various locations involving permissions from the West Central Railway has been challenging, especially since the grade separator passes through various RORs (Rail Over Rail). Working in between the tracks is always risky, but we are taking all precautions to keep our men, material, and machinery safe.
G Shettar
Project Director
Divided into two packages, downline & upline, the Katni Grade Separator Project (KGSP) involves the construction of rail viaducts on pile foundations, composite steel girders & deck slabs, open web girders, retaining walls, minor bridges, earthwork, and other allied civil engineering works. From an EHS perspective, the onus on Project Director G Shettar, EHSO Sridam Khanra, and team is to keep their people safe and the project on track.
To obtain permissions from the electricity department to temporarily shut down the transmission line during girder lifting & erections requires careful planning and coordination to ensure that there is no disruption of power supply to the area.
Sridam Khanra
EHSO
Hurdles are there to be overcome
Working on the edge, next to a ‘live’ railway line: To mitigate the risk of working in proximity to a busy railway track, the team coordinates with the railway authorities to ensure that their erection plans are adjusted according to the train schedules. “Procuring RoW at various locations involving permissions from the West Central Railway has been challenging,” grimaces Shettar, “especially since the grade separator passes through various RORs (Rail Over Rail). Working in between the tracks is always risky, but we are taking all precautions to keep our men, material, and machinery safe,” he smiles reassuringly.
Hazards above and below: Making sense of the many existing, unknown, and unidentified underground utilities, signalling and telecommunication (S&T), and optical fibre & electrical cables has been painstaking work, for any damage to these during excavation and boring invites huge penalties and risk to lives. “We have dedicated staff trained to use sophisticated equipment to track underground utilities,” notes Sridam. “In fact, S&T clearances have been incorporated along with permits for excavations that we verify before any excavation at site.”
There are overhead risks to mitigate in the form of high voltage transmission cables running close to the site. “To obtain permissions from the electricity department to temporarily shut down the transmission line during girder lifting & erections requires careful planning and coordination to ensure that there is no disruption of power supply to the area,” mentions Sridam.
Developing in-house capabilities: Faced with the prospect of having to fabricate 665 girder spans involving quantities of about 37,000 MT, the team cleverly established an atomized RDSO approved in-house workshop equipped with new-age CNC equipment and machinery for fabrication, blasting, metalizing, and paint work. The workshop is equipped with various automated computer numerical– controlled plate cutting, plate drilling, and profile cutting machines to control costs, eliminate manual labour, and achieve accuracies of 0.010 mm, which increases productivity. CNC ensures optimum utilization of plates and thus reduces wastage.
“To meet our objectives of improving efficiencies and, at the same time, control costs, we have in-house developed several unique set-ups,” informs Soumendra Kishore Roy Choudhury, Lead – Fabrication & Erection, referring first to the rolling stands for Submerged Arc Welding (SAW). Originally, heavyduty stands fabricated in the workshop used to hold the girder segments for horizontal welding at various corners of the girder, which necessitated rolling the segment every time after welding each corner. A gantry could have been used for this purpose, though it would have been time-consuming to rig the load multiple times with associated risks. “Instead, we fixed a jib crane with chainblock to set up the girder segment in the rolling stand,” points out Soumendra. “After welding each corner, it requires just two workmen to set the segment for the next welding, and for safety purposes, we have fitted the rolling stand with two locking facilities to arrest the rotation of the table.”
To meet our objectives of improving efficiencies and, at the same time, control costs, we have in-house developed several unique set-ups.
Soumendra Kishore Roy Choudhury
Lead – Fabrication & Erection
A template was fabricated by the team whereby stiffener plates are welded at fixed distances from each other, to reduce the time taken to mark distance and fix the stiffener. After temporarily fixing the template in the girder, each stiffener is placed in the slots provided in the template and welded. This process has eliminated the repetitive activity of measuring dimensions and marking positions before fit-up, saving time & effort in the process, and increasing productivity.
Safe heavy lifting: Tandem lifting heavy and lengthy composite girders weighing 50 tons and 24–26 m in length and placing them on pier caps is another tough task. Since some of the erection sites are adjacent to public roads, there is always the risk of public and vehicular traffic interference. “To overcome these challenges, we use a tire-mounted crane with lifting capacities of 250 and 240 tons, fitted with lifting equipment, including slings and spreader bars, to ensure that the girder is lifted and positioned safely,” says Soumendra.
While tyre-mounted cranes are more mobile than crawler cranes, they are not ideal to erect composite girders on narrow roads. “Ensuring the crane’s stability during lifting operations requires careful planning and coordination between the crane operator, the rigging crew, and the project engineers,” mentions Sridam. “The safety of the workers involved in the lifting operations is equally critical and requires the use of appropriate safety equipment, such as harnesses, safety lines, and hard hats, as well as proper training and supervision.”
Carefully working at height: High on Sridam’s agenda is to keep people safe when working on top of piers 19 m from the ground. Since hard barricades are not possible on completed pier caps due to quality issues, apart from safety nets and well-secured staircases, the team developed ‘C clamp barricading poles’ that are fixed at the edge of pier caps, with a provision to fix horizontal rails. A bench vice–like arrangement in the bottom of vertical poles is clamped on the edge of the pier cap, which is loosened after the job is completed. When load-tested on site, these rails were strong enough to withstand a drop load of 90 kg.
Hazard mapping and pictorial hazard maps drive safety, and so also the Traffic Risk Assessment Plan that pictorially and descriptively communicates risk levels and mitigation measures.
Recognition and sustainable efforts: Shettar is delighted with the RoSPA Gold, the National Safety Council’s Prashamsapatra, and CII’s Gold Award for Safety Excellence that his project has won.
On the sustainability front, the site planted 1,141 saplings as part of Project Green Hands, while an aerobic decomposing set-up, fabricated inhouse, decomposes solid food waste to humus (can be used as organic fertilizer) by using atmospheric oxygen. The nearly 50 kg of food waste generated in one workmen camp is collected by the respective authorities, and the EHS team has decided to recycle this food waste as organic fertilizer to be used in the site garden. Solar lights in the workmen camp save energy too.
As a CSR initiative, the site has donated benches and chairs, ceiling fans, and air coolers to the Government Primary School of Padariya & Jalwara villages, benefiting some 400 school students.
While they have a fair distance to go before their project is commissioned, Shettar and his team are confident that they can deliver, maintaining their perfect safety track record.