RInfra builds cooling tower that is not that cool on safety aspect

RInfra calls it a “minor deviation” but an expert panel report says it’s “structurally unsafe”

Sandeep Pai l Mumbai

If it wasn’t bad enough that the Damodar Valley Corporation (DVC) granted Reliance Infra Limited a contract to build the Rs4,000cr Raghunathpur Thermal Power Plant (RTPP) in violation of several rules, a DNA investigation has found that the Anil Ambani-owned company used less steel in the construction of a natural draft cooling tower (NDCT) for one of the project’s two power generation units. This has made the structure unsafe and the tower (NDCT1) will have to be partially demolished and rebuilt.
According to the original plan, the two RTPP units of 600MW each were to start commercial operations by October 2010 (unit 1) and November 2010 (unit 2).
The irregularity in construction of the cooling tower was detected after an RTPP engineer wrote to senior DVC officials. Work on the tower was halted in October 2010. If work to demolish and rebuild the defective portion of the structure had been taken up in October 2010 itself, a considerable amount of time and money would have been saved.
“By wasting 14 months, the country has lost at least Rs2,000cr to date,” said Padamjit Singh, chairman, All-India Power Engineers Federation (AIPEF). Essentially, the delay is costing the country Rs 6cr a day, if one calculates the power DVC could have sold if the project had become operational as per the original schedule.
Emphasising that “the issue of the cooling tower has never been a reason for delay of the project,” RInfra claimed that the delay was caused by difficulty in land acquisition by DVC and the West Bengal government as well as other factors.
The company also pointed out that it was not the only entity involved in construction of the plant. “RInfra was awarded only the main plant packages (including BTG) & the ‘Balance of Plant’ (BOP) packages. These apart, there are other very critical packages without which the power plant units can’t be operationalised; viz coal-handling plant, water intake system & reservoirs, water treatment plant, railway corridor for coal transportation etc, all of which were awarded to various other entities.”

According to a rough estimate, RInfra would have saved several crores by reducing the amount of steel in the tower’s construction. “It is fairly evident that using lesser steel was a deliberate act of fraud for which action under the prevailing anti-corruption laws should be taken,” said Singh.
Despite reduction in the amount of steel used, RInfra claimed the structure was safe. DNA has a copy of a letter written by Raghav Trivedi, project officer, RInfra RTPP project. He said: “NDCT tower is structurally safe as per the codal requirements. Furthermore, we have also established that the circumferential reinforcement provided in the NDCT shell is as per the drawing at the NDCT at site.” Paharpur Cooling Towers Limited, subcontractor for building the tower, took a similar line in another letter.
After pressure from the engineers’ association and representations from other groups, in February 2011, DVC constituted a committee comprising members from the Central Electricity Authority (CEA), Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL), TCE Consulting Engineers Limited (TCE) and itself to study the issue.
The committee was to submit its final report in a month. But it took five months, suggesting that it may have been under pressure to give RInfra a clean chit. A senior DVC official, on condition of anonymity, said: “It is difficult to understand why the committee took five months.”
The report, submitted in July, concluded that the cooling tower was unsafe because the amount of steel used in it was less than that outlined in its design. The report, of which DNA has a copy, said deviations were to the tune of hundreds of percentages in some cases. DVC then directed RInfra to demolish and rebuild the tower. DNA has a copy of the minutes of the July 30, 2011, meeting chaired by the DVC chairman in the presence of ICP Keshari, joint secretary (thermal), which directed RInfra to dismantle the defective portion of NDCT1.
Till that happened, it was decided to use cooling tower 2 (NDCT 2). “The decision will delay things further as neither of the units will work properly,” said a plant engineer. The demolition work has just started, said Rabindra Nath Sen, DVC chairman, adding that the company was trying to complete the project as quickly as possible.
Even now, RInfra refers to the deviations as “minor localized deviations” in “three tiers”, adding: “This poses no hazard for the structural stability of the concerned NDCT... There is no question of whole NDCT being defective and unsafe to operate.” The committee, however, had concluded that the anomalies were there in seven tiers of the 35 constructed.
Several letters of complaint were written to Union power minister Sushilkumar Shinde along with the CVO, DVC, regarding the matter of the cooling towers. A reply under the Right to Information Act revealed that while the minister’s personal secretary forwarded the letters to the DVC desk, the reply to these complaints has not yet been received.