Not a single structural engineer was involved in the design of the renovation of the Novi Sad Railway Station building, where 14 people died and three are fighting for their lives after a canopy collapsed the day before yesterday. According to the publicly available project documentation of the CIP Traffic Institute, four architects were engaged in this project for “interior design and internal water and sewerage installations,” while the main designer is the “responsible designer of traffic routes.” Among the victims buried under the rubble are two girls, sisters aged 5 and 9.
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Despite all the shameless attempts by the authorities, Infrastructure Railways of Serbia and the Chinese consortium CRIC CCCC, which carried out the works, to “wash their hands” with claims that the canopy was not part of the reconstruction, hundreds of photos that flooded the networks prove that its structure was indeed manipulated. Shortly after the accident, photos appeared that unequivocally show not only the construction work but also tons of glass and iron that were added to the existing canopy. Considering that none of the signatories on the project is specialized in such work, it was only a matter of time before yesterday’s tragedy occurred.
“I don’t see any designer with a 310 license on this list, which is a license for a structural engineer, and that’s a problem. If they did anything in structural terms, it is absolutely unacceptable that there is no calculation and that it was done without a structural engineer. I’m not even sure if the woman who signed as the main designer can sign this with her 310 license, which is a responsible designer for roads and railways,” says Andrijana Milovanović, a structural engineer with decades of experience in the position of a leading engineer.
According to her, her colleagues have been witnessing the adaptation of regulations to investors for years.
“There are few of us, structural engineers, and rarely will any of us compromise and sign something that shouldn’t be. When they realized that, about ten years ago, they started giving legal rights to give such jobs and projects to people who don’t know how to do it, and who will sign everything and turn a blind eye, to approve, it doesn’t matter if they don’t know for 50, 100, 1,000 euros… Unfortunately, our law allows architects to calculate for some smaller objects, but in this case, you should ask those people who signed this project which of you has the right to sign a static calculation?” says Milovanović. She adds that in the case of work on this canopy, despite the adaptation of the law in favor of investors, only “structural engineers” should have been engaged.
Železnička stanica u Novom Sadu Foto:Nenad Mihajlovic / AFP / Profimedia
“Regardless of the fact that they have given various rights to other engineers who are not educated for it, here we have hangers that we, structural engineers, do exclusively. Not even half of us can do that because these are very complicated calculations, very few people know how to do it, and in such cases when something like this is reconstructed, a civil engineer with a 310 license must be involved!” explains our interlocutor. Given that there is no structural engineering designer among the signatories, Milovanović believes that he is presented in such a way that there is “no structural work at all, but that it is a matter of pure aesthetics.”
Železnička stanica u Novom Sadu Foto:FoNet/MUP Srbije
“In this project, there is generally no Notebook 2 from the regulations of the Law on Planning and Construction, which refers to the construction. That is, it was supposed to be some kind of adaptation that has no structural changes. However, there is definitely something there,” says our interlocutor.
“The canopy was not actually dimensioned to carry anything in structural terms, considering how it broke. It was actually ‘hung’, or ‘suspended’ from the roof and was carried by the roof overhang and hangers. It seems that there was a sudden overload in all the cables in all places, or, more likely, the hangers were ‘pulled out’ because someone was working on the roof during the reconstruction,” says Milovanović, emphasizing that she is voluntarily offering her services to assess the circumstances that led to this tragedy.
Since all the work that Chinese companies do in Serbia is strictly guarded secret, from the project itself, the terms of the contract, financing, so the project of reconstructing the Railway Station is also unknown to this day.
According to Naim Lea Beširi from the Institute for European Affairs, just a few hours after the tragedy, all relevant data on the approval of construction works on the reconstruction of the Railway Station were deleted from the CEOP platform of the Agency for Business Registers for electronic submission of requests. While cranes and excavators were still digging out the victims under the rubble, texts and photos that, only a few months ago, praised the beauty of the “new reconstructed canopy” at the Railway Station were systematically removed from the internet. In a tragedy that Novi Sad has never seen before, fourteen people died yesterday under tons of concrete, glass, and iron of the “unreconstructed” canopy, while three more young people are fighting for their lives at the Clinical Center of Vojvodina.
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Source: NovaS
Photo: FoNet/MUP Srbije