Malabar Hill High School was rocked by detonation at a nearby location

Mumbai: Residents of Las Palmas, a 60-year-old building, have voiced worry over the structural integrity of their building after controlled blasting was conducted next to them on Malabar Hill.

Reliance Industries owns the land where the bungalow had stood; a skyscraper is proposed there. According to Malabar Hill police, all necessary authorizations are in place for the controlled detonation.

Interestingly, since the project is being built above a coastal road tunnel, the building proposal department of Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has requested that the building proposal department assess the design as part of its safety inspection of the site. HT published a story about this on December 5. Its neighboring high-rise, which is still under construction, is also being examined. The Silkyara tunnel collapse, which left 41 miners stranded for 17 days, was the cause of the worry.

“We can feel the tremors on the ground floor and hear the noise,” said a cooperative society office bearer in Las Palmas on Friday. The structure is quite ancient and mostly inhabited by older persons. The route from Kemps Corner to Hanging Gardens had collapsed four years before. We don’t want a situation like this to arise again.

The society expressed its disapproval and demanded that the blasting cease in letters sent on Thursday and Friday to the local police, the blasting agency, Raigad Enterprises, project managers of Reliance Industries, and the Petroleum and Explosive Safety Organization (PESO), which is the nodal agency for regulating the safety of hazardous substances like explosives, petroleum, and compressed gas.

The Reliance Industries project manager had sent the housing society a request for a notice of certification (NOC) for a single, controlled trial explosion in October. The society declined the request due to concerns over the structural integrity of the structure. The society’s members said that if the nearby buildings agreed to the change, they would be open to reevaluating their stance.

“We got a letter from Raigad Enterprises on Thursday, stating that they have the NOC for conducting tests between December 14 and 22 from PESO and the Mumbai commissioner of police,” the resident added.

Malabar Hill Police Station senior police inspector Uday Singh Shingade agreed with the letter and informed HT that “only controlled blasting was taking place for which all permissions were sought.”

An employee of Raigad Enterprises, a company that sells construction materials and handles explosives, said that they did not need an NOC from the housing societies. In a similar tone, a representative from IR Enterprises, the company doing the excavations, stated. “Reliance has obtained the necessary licenses from both the central government and the police. At the location are teams from the National Institute of Rock Mechanics (NIRM) and the federal government. The work is being completed in accordance with directives from the national government. It’s secure. There is no need for residents to be concerned.

According to the coastal road agency, the site’s controlled blasting poses no threat to safety.