Four-second ending to a diabolical disaster

Was the enormous pubic interest in the tower ‘Belief’ coming down ghoulish? Or was it justifiable triumphalism in seeing an edifice of greed coming down? There had not been a city event like this attracting saturation media coverage like the demolition job on the Moulivakkam multi-storey building disaster.

The long running saga of the developer’s greed and developer-builder-bureaucracy nexus came to an end in just under four seconds as if to prove that nemesis strikes fast while men may have plotted for years to put together their little egg nests.

The prospect of the spectacle of a crumbling building seemed so fascinating that television channels flocked to cover the event live even as hundreds of people gathered in the vicinity for a ringside view. The speaking prowess of the newscasters was severely tested as the drama lasted a number of hours more than anticipated because the demolition team needed more time to put all the fuses to the explosives together again after delinking them because of bad weather. Having whipped up their expectancy, TV viewers were compelled to watch endlessly as anchors prattled on.

This wasn’t a horror show quite in the league of 9/11 when those twin towers came down in New York at the beginning of the millennium.  

One of this set of twin towers had come down earlier in the southwest monsoon of 2014 leaving the other standing as a symbol of the worst practices in the building trade. While abandoned buildings of any kind may attract anti social elements looking for a place of entertainment for themselves, the history of this twin tower rendered this building a silent spectator for a couple of years while as an appeal reached and was heard in the Supreme Court too.

Having seen ‘Faith’ come down on a rainy 2014 night killing 61 innocent workers, it would have made sense for the developer himself to arrange to bring the other structure down, No more proof was needed of his shoddy planning in putting up a matchbox structure on an obviously weak foundation. On what basis anyone could argue for relief for such an unsustainable project is beyond comprehension. And yet legal avenues had to be allowed to be exhausted before the demolishers could be given permission to get in and do what was absolutely necessary to finish off a threat to public safety.

The speed with which the building crumbled may have been from a combination of the thoroughness of the demolishers as well as the basic weakness of the structure. The demolition job was a near perfect one with the least amount of collateral damage imaginable in a crowded space wherein adjoining buildings were abutting the compound wall of the ill-fated plot of the twin towers. DC photographers came back with pictures of very minor damage to the glass panes in windows of some adjoining houses. For an operation of this size, such damage was trifling.

Frightening as the power of the explosives like RDX, C4 and stuff that we had read about only in novels and news reports of terror events, the planned implosion was as per the script with just that flash of light from the 5th floor presenting a kind of weird and momentary visual spectacle, which soon gave way to a plume of dust. This must have been the quickest climax ever executed in a city somewhat famous for special effects cinema in a suburb not far from the one in which ‘Faith’ and ‘Belief’ crumbled in the blink of an eye.  

The building had to come down to uphold an important principle. The collapse of the first tower was no force majeure as claimed. Had lightning possessed the power to bring down a tower, a city of thunderstorms would not have survived in this shape. Why had not the builders thought of lightning conductors running any such strikes to earth? After a manmade disaster of this nature, the case had to be treated in an exemplary way. It is a pity that those 72 homebuyers are left holding the baby as it were. They are not going to get back the '30 crore they were supposed to have paid and they have to keep paying the EMIs to the banks.  

The human part of this tragedy of the dreams of homebuyers being shattered like this will be around for years. There is no quick solution to this and considering the pace at which justice moved, even in this relatively fast 2-year disposal of the demolition question, it would be prudent of the stricken buyers not to raise their hopes too high, especially since the court has ruled that the land goes back to the developer. 

The value of that land, degraded by the terrible tragedy on its soil, is the only thing that can bring about a rescue package, an amelioration of those unwittingly dragged into the twin towers of a diabolical disaster.