Sola STP deaths expose Ahmedabad's O&M contract gap

The Incident at Sola

Two men died at the Sola sewage treatment plant on Monday. They worked for HNB Agency Company.

The job was welding on a live tank at a facility owned by Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. The Corporation owns the asset. HNB Agency owns the site risk.

The crew was not unsupervised. Four employees were named:

- Manoj was the site in-charge.
- Rupesh was the site project manager.
- Abhishek was a welder.
- Nilesh was the driver and the fourth employee named.

Both Manoj and Rupesh were on site when Abhishek lost consciousness in a gas-charged atmosphere and fell in. Two of the four did not come out.

The 45-Minute Rescue

Divisional Fire Officer SB Jadeja put the rescue at 45 minutes. That number carries more weight than anything else in the report.

With a tripod, a harness and supplied air, one casualty comes out in minutes. Forty-five is what happens when colleagues go in without breathing apparatus to pull a man out.

India's sewage fatality record follows that pattern almost without exception.

Welding at an operating STP tank is a dual-permit job: hot work inside a confined space. Very few municipal O&M contracts price continuous gas monitoring or a tripod-and-harness retrieval rig as separate line items, because every priced item lifts the bid. So the equipment does not arrive, and the permit register is not audited.

A Tender Decision, Not a Site Decision

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation's sewerage department now faces a tender decision, not a site decision.

Reissue the schedule of rates with a priced safety annexure, audited by Corporation engineers and not the contractor's supervisor. Or pre-qualify bidders on demonstrated confined-space capability before technical evaluation. The second is cheaper to administer and harder to fake.

AMRUT 2.0 has pushed hundreds of urban local bodies into STP retrofits and O&M packages, and those packages generate far more chamber entries than the greenfield construction deals that absorb all the safety scrutiny. HNB Agency is the kind of mid-sized agency taking that work.

Every STP retrofit contract signed this financial year either prices gas detection and standby rescue, or it prices compensation, prosecution and a 45-minute rescue.

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation should settle that before the next chamber is opened.