Ghaggar bridge repairs trigger snarl-ups on Chandigarh-Ambala road

With one side of the Ghaggar bridge in Bhankharpur under repair, snarl-ups made life miserable for road users on the Chandigarh-Ambala national highway since Sunday morning.

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Long queues of vehicle were seen till McDonald’s light point on Zirakpur side and till Mubarikpur on the Dera Bassi side for most part of the day. People were stuck in their vehicles in sweltering heat on both sides of the bridge on the national highway as repair work hardly left any space for the vehicles to pass through. “One of the expansion joint broke after a bridge span sunk. It has been two days since the repair work is going on and it might take some more time,” said a civil engineer at the site.

The vehicles were crawling in one lane while the other lane of the Zirakpur-Ambala side was being repaired, leading to a bottleneck here, said a commuter.

Traffic police and SSF has been deputed to regulate the movement of vehicles, but with very limited success. Zirakpur traffic in charge Harkesh Singh said, “The NHAI and contractor have been informed and repair work is underway. Police is doing its level best to manage the situation.”

This is for the second time the old bridge on the Chandigarh-Delhi road has been damaged since 2016. At present, only one lane of the old bridge on the Zirakpur-Ambala side is functional, while the Ambala-Zirakpur side is being catered to by a new bridge built during the four-laning of the national highway.