Less than a week af­ter the Bridge B 1/3 at New Colo­nial Road, Bar­rack­pore, col­lapsed fol­low­ing dev­as­tat­ing floods, a tem­po­rary bai­ley bridge has been opened to the pub­lic.

Lo­cal gov­ern­ment min­is­ter Kaz­im Ho­sein vis­it­ed the area on Fri­day and met with res­i­dents who ex­pressed re­lief that the New Colo­nial Road was fi­nal­ly opened again.

At Num­ber 2 Junc­tion, busi­ness­man Ed­die Sur­jan said even though the bridge was in­com­plete, he was thank­ful it was still open.

“My roti shop was flood­ed out and af­ter the bridge start­ed to cave my sales went down by 70 per cent, “ Sur­jan said. He not­ed that even though rail­ings still had to be set up, he was pleased that the bridge was up in record time.

Dur­ing an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Min­is­ter Ho­sein said it was through the quick ef­forts of Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan that the bridge was re­stored.

“On Sat­ur­day I got a call from a res­i­dent say­ing the bridge has col­lapsed. I im­me­di­ate­ly con­tact­ed the Min­is­ter of Works who act­ed swift­ly and we at the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment as­sist­ed with equip­ment. Its a one-lane now and some in­con­ve­nience was caused but at least mo­torists are able to use the road now,” Ho­sein added.

With re­gard to the flood al­lo­ca­tion of $2 mil­lion, Ho­sein said this was suf­fi­cient to re­place food and clean­ing sup­plies. He said the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment will be on the field con­duct­ing as­sess­ments to re­place house­hold ar­ti­cles.

“We had to wait un­til the wa­ter went down and Cepep crews will come in and clean,” Ho­sein said.

He called on all Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion of­fi­cials to make as­sess­ments and tours be­fore grant­i­ng build­ing ap­provals.

Ho­sein al­so called for an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the ac­tiv­i­ties of Town and Coun­try Plan­ning say­ing sus­pi­cious ap­provals were be­ing grant­ed for con­struc­tion projects.

Mean­while, Works Min­is­ter Ro­han Sinanan said full paving of the bridge will be com­plet­ed by Tues­day.

He said he was cog­nisant of the hard­ships faced by res­i­dents and this was why the bridge was opened.

Sinanan said the bridge was set up with­in min­i­mal cost as every­thing was done by both Min­istries.

He not­ed that the bai­ley bridge was wider and larg­er than the ex­ist­ing bridge.