KOLKATA: The whole of north and central Kolkata will go dry this Saturday when the Kolkata Municipal Corporation KMC ) water supply department is scheduled to undertake an urgent work to facilitate construction of a ventilation shaft and an emergency exit for the East-West Metro at Raja Subodh Mullick Square.The civic body will need to extract a Raj-era underground water pipe at the Lenin Sarani-Nirmal Chandra Street intersection to make room for the ventilation shaft and the emergency exit for Metro commuters. According to a KMC official, the civic body will shut down entire operation at Palta and Tallah after supplying water to north and central Kolkata at 9.30am on March 30. Filtered water supply will be restored at 6.30am the next day. Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation (KMRC) authorities had approached the civic brass to survey all underground utilities before the agency cleared the decks for construction of the ventilation shaft. “Given the space crunch in the densely populated area at Subodh Mullick Square, we had to survey all underground utilities minutely before allowing KMRC to utilize space for construction of the shaft,” a KMC water supply department official said.A survey for the underground utilities traced the presence of a century-old underground waterpipe. “We had no idea about the pipe. After locating it, we tried to understand the area the pipe used to supply water to. After a lot of research, we found that the pipe was locked. We then treated it as defunct and decided to remove it for the construction of the shaft,” a civic official said.Though all necessary arrangements have been made, KMC will have to tread with caution while pulling the defunct pipe out without disturbing the adjacent ones. One of these pipes is as old as the defunct one but it supplies water to high-profile addresses in the BBD Bag area, including Raj Bhawan and Calcutta High Court . KMC will need to dig up a 30m stretch to pull out the pipe buried 12ft below the ground.According to a KMRC official, the upcoming construction work will be challenging as they need to dig a 35m hole (equivalent to an 11-storey building) for the shaft and an emergency exit. “We will start construction of the shaft after KMC gives us land by removing the defunct water pipe. We need to ensure that no underground utility, including water pipes, get breached during the construction work. We have been told that a special machine will take care of the piling work,” said a KMRC official.

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