Buthidaung-Maungdaw road to reopen in August
July 26 - August 1, 2010
Workers carry building materials close to the halfway point on the 26-kilometre Buthidaung-Maungdaw road in northern Rakhine State on July 14. Pic: Lwin Maung Maung
THE road between Buthidaung and Maungdaw in northern Rakhine State is expected to reopen to heavy trucks in mid-August, engineers working on the damaged road said earlier this month.
Maungdaw township engineer U Kyaw Moe Naing said on July 14 that road and bridge building teams from the Myanmar Public Works Department had been working “round the clock” since the landslide and had so far repaired about 80 percent of the road.
“Starting from the day of the landslides we have been repairing” the road and on July 12 it was opened to small vehicles, he said. “The passage of heavy trucks has been suspended since the landslides but [we expect] they will be able to resume using the road in about one month.”
The 26-kilometre (16-mile) road was damaged in almost 100 places by landslides following torrential rain on the evening of June 14 that saw in excess of 13 inches (33cm) of rain fall in 24 hours.
Ten bridges were also seriously damaged as a result of the storm, U Kyaw Moe Naing told The Myanmar Times as he supervised a group of workers repairing bridge number 12/8, about halfway between the two towns.
“This bridge was previously a Bailey bridge and we modified it into an ordinary arched bridge made of brick and mortar,” he said. “The unusually heavy rains brought down huge tree stumps and logs that blocked the arches and prevented the water from flowing. The water banked up and the force of it eventually caused the bridge to give way.”– Translated by Khin Aung
