Noida Twin Towers Demolition: Traffic Diversions, Roads To Avoid On Sunday

The illegal Supertech twin towers in Noida, said to be taller than the Qutub Minar, are all set to be demolished on Sunday afternoon -- over nine years after residents first went to court against it. It will take just about nine seconds to demolish them using 3,700 kg of explosives, with nearly 20,000 connections to its pillars, triggering "one-tenth of a Magnitude-4 earthquake".

Traffic diversions 

Speaking to NDTV, Noida's Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Ganesh Shankar Shah explained the administration's plan to manage traffic. 

"The roads around the twin towers will be sealed at 7 am on Sunday," he said, adding that all the roads leading to the towers will be closed with barricades.

The Noida and Greater Noida Expressways will also be closed at 2:15 pm, he explained. They will be reopened after the dust settles. The administration hopes the expressway will close for just half an hour.

All diversions will also be updated on Google Maps to help commuters navigate smoothly, he said.

A full checking will be done 30 minutes before the blast, DCP Shah said, and assured that the most experienced traffic cops have been put on duty.

Preparations 

The Noida authorities and Supertech contracted a company called Edifice Engineering. It has had success in similar projects abroad. Some of the floors were, meanwhile, demolished with manual labour, to make the eventual blast-and-fall relatively less intense.

All final preparations are done, Mayur Mehta, a Project Manager at Edifice Engineering which is responsible for the demolition, had told NDTV. 

"We have today connected the explosives on each floor to the wire and will set them off by pressing a button from 100 meters away," he said.

Mr Mehta said the dust will remain for 12-15 minutes after the demolition but the debris will not fly off to nearby buildings. "Even if the debris does scatter, we have covered the residential buildings with a special type of cloth," he said, adding that all they need are people's prayers.

Now, Apex (32 floors) and Ceyane (29 floors) will collapse "like a waterfall", with the trigger scheduled for 2.30pm, August 28. That'll be the end of the illegal project - once billed as among the biggest in the region, covering 7.5 lakh square feet.

Delayed demolition

The Supreme Court has given a go-ahead for demolishing the twin towers with explosives. The exercise was supposed to start on August 21 but the court accepted the Noida Authority's request and extended the date of the demolition to August 28.

The twin towers are set to be razed over grave violations of building norms. The Supreme Court had said that it was a result of "nefarious complicity" between the Noida Authority and Supertech and ordered that the company shall carry out the demolition at its own expense under the supervision of the Noida Authority and an expert body like the Central Building Research Institute.