If you glimpse the foothils of Bajpe hill, where Bajpe Airport is perched, you will smell danger. Mining is causing fresh turbulence.
DNA had reported on August 23 that the airport’s runway could cave in. Chairman of the court of inquiry into the May 22 air crash, Air Marshal (retd) B Neelkanth Gokhale, had said the issue would be taken up with the chief secretary of Karnataka or even with the Centre, and requested Airports Authority of India’s (AAI’s) top brass to despatch an assessment team to Bajpe.
But nothing has been done so far. Instead, senior AAI officials say: “How can a runway ‘cave in’ just because the airport is at a tabletop?...How can anybody suggest any danger to the runway?” DNA had also published these comments.
But experts have now confirmed to DNA that danger lurks beneath, because mining is peeling away iron- and aluminium-rich laterite layers which strengthen the surface on which Bajpe Airport's runway sits.
DNA’s visit to these mines on Wednesday reveals that intense mining activity for laterite, granite and loose soil, all for Mangalore city's increasing construction activity, is going on within a 900-metre radius of the runway. A senior official from mines and geology department says this violates mining rules, which state that mining and blasting cannot be allowed within 900 metres of airport's perimeter wall.
The department’s officials confirm that granite mining is carried out within 700 meters of the airport’s perimeter wall, and mining for loose soil and laterite is done less than 500 metres in three different directions of Bajpe hill.
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