A roof collapsed early this morning in Indira Gandhi International Airport Terminal 1 after torrential rains battered the Indian capital. Tragically, death and injury resulted. The incident is not only a tragedy, but a warning to us all.
Roof Collapse At Delhi Airport Terminal 1
It is monsoon season in India but the rains have been particularly pernicious this week. In New Delhi, nine inches of rain have fallen in the last 24 hours, including nearly six inches in three hours early this morning. That led to the collapse of a portion of the roof in Terminal 1:
Terminal 1 Incident pic.twitter.com/Dv9Sir5l4p
— Delhi Airport (@DelhiAirport) June 28, 2024
At this point, one person is confirmed dead and eight injured.
It is not for me to draw conclusions concerning who is to blame or what happened, at least at this point. The death and injuries are too fresh and pointing fingers in anger does not prevent future catastrophes. There are gruesome images and videos of what occurred that I do not feel right posting (you can view them via View From The Wing), but today’s events are undeniably tragic.
But I do hope there will be lessons learned from this. Already, the Indian government has ordered the inspections of other airport facilities. That sort of reactive instinct is reasonable. But what we should see in India–and indeed in the United States and other Western nations–is a fundamental change in how 1.) new structures are built and 2.) older structures are maintained. Yes, building and retrofitting to withstand “once-in-a-lifetime” storms is not cheap, but it is necessary.
It’s not enough to say that an airport terminal is built to withstand a “normal “storm when weather patterns are changing and freak storms that dump immense amounts of water or wind in a concentrated period are moving from rare to far more common.
If a roof cannot withstand six inches of rain in three hours, it is unfit for public use. We’ve dodged a lot of serious incidents, but in the face of a changing climate, cutting corners now will cost us so much more in the future. But building airports and other infrastructure with the expectation of worst-case weather events will reduce death and injury and create more durable and sustainable modes of commerce with great benefit for many generations.
There is always a cost/benefit analysis to be discussed, but every bridge or airport terminal collapse suggests that we are not taking the issue of infrastructure safety seriously enough.
My heart goes out to the families of the dead and injured.
“ There are gruesome images and videos of what occurred that I do not feel right posting (you can view them via View From The Wing),”
I’m not sure what is worse, Gary posting these horrible pics or you promoting it for him. Honestly this maybe is the first thing I’ve disagreed with you on. I get the goal of clickbait to pay the bills but this seems a step too far. And linking to them really isn’t any different in my opinion.*
I’m not “promoting” them and I feel like they should not be shared publicly, which is why I do not even link to them directly here. But the pictures and video, which I cannot unsee, do underscore what a SERIOUS matter this is. I do a lot of clickbait, but this wasn’t one of them…I view the infrastructure issue as very serious.
Oh do grow up Dave. Death is a part of the everyday and if you know there are images you don’t wish to view, just don’t view them. No need to make an announcement, this isn’t an airport.
Would you advocate applying the Hammurabic code to the responsible parties?
I place a big emphasis on mens rea. Were corners knowingly cut? Was it gross negligence? And if so…
It’s India, yeah, corners were probably cut.
The problem you get into is what do you define as ‘extreme’ any more? How far do you go? It rained 9 inches in a day over there. What do you design for? 18″? As you mentioned there is a definite cost to doing this, so the alternative is to build constrained facilities because planning for capacity growth is too cost prohibitive. I would like to see the investigation to see if the area ha collapsed was build to standards? Or was shoddy construction involved where the inspectors were paid to look the other way? It could be that the design was quite good, but corruption in construction caused the structure to fail prematurely.
There are still a lot of British Raj era bungalows in the Lutyens zone of the capital. While they too have had their issues at times, many of them have survived more monsoon rains and other environmental stresses (including pollution) even with all the flooding that has never stopped being an issue in a city that gets hit by monsoon rains in a country that counts on them (and even related floods) for the economy.
While collapsed parts of public infrastructure and plant do happen also in such places as in the US and Norway, in India it’s far more common for the crooked politicians, crooked bureaucrats and domestic mafias to be in cahoots together to see safety and other regulatory standards selectively observed or selectively ignored. This too is in a country where engineering was often pursued as a career because of the relatively lucrative nature of engineering and “safety” jobs in the public sector or as a government contractor because it provides rampant opportunities to get richer quicker via corrupt practices. And the India of today is no less corrupt than it used to be — rather the corruption is so massive in scale and scope today that it probably makes Pakistan’s military jealous. And yet not all that hits in India can objectively be blamed on corruption always.