A large hoarding, 120 ft x 120 ft in size, collapsed in Mumbai killing 14 people and injuring more than 70.
AMN / MUMBAI
Fourteen people were killed and 43 others have been injured after a billboard collapsed during a fierce storm in Mumbai yesterday. Meanwhile, Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde has announced an assistance of 5 lakh rupees to the families of the deceased. Mr. Shinde said that instructions have been given to the administration to take appropriate measures to prevent such incidents from happening again.
Incident occurred after a 100-foot-tall billboard was uprooted and fell on a petrol pump and nearby houses at the Cheddanagar Junction in the Ghatkopar area. The injured have been admitted to different hospitals in Mumbai. Some people are still trapped.
Rescue operation is still going on. NDRF, Ambulances and other agencies have been pressed into service. A case of culpable homicide has been registered against those responsible for this accident.
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@SudiptoDoc Ghatkopar’s billboard that collapsed killing 14 people was hit by a space rocket taking off from earth. Well, not exactly, but the impact was almost like that. A large hoarding, 120 ft x 120 ft in size, collapsed in Mumbai killing 14 people and injuring more than 70. The accident lays bare critical flaws in understanding how storms behave and the criminal negligence of authorities who allowed that structure to even go up when the maximum size allowed was 40 ft X 40 ft. Let us understand it like this. Air has mass and volume, and is known to exert pressure. A grain of dust has a density of about 0.5 gm/cc, while air is just 0.0012 gm/cc. So a grain of dust has almost 415 times mass as a dust particle sized volume of air. These dust particles in dust storms massively increase the density of air. Even if one assumes that only a minuscule volume of air is replaced by dust aerosols in a storm, the density of air increases almost 2-3 times. On a 120 ft X 120 ft hoarding standing at 90 degrees, a storm blowing at 60 km/h would exert a wind force of about 400000 newtons. For comparison, the Atlas V, Americas longest serving active rocket, uses the RD-180 engine that generates 4 million newtons of thrust for liftoff. The wind force on that billboard on that fateful moment yesterday was almost one tenth of the force generated by one of the world’s most powerful rocket engines. No doubt the billboard structure, though mounted on a robust iron frame, was blown to smithereens. Municipal authorities, it helps to not skip basic science classes. And to not engage in sordid acts of corruption.