First Puja shopping and now the wedding season. The ailing Bijon Setu’s health survey has been stalled again.

Mayor Firhad Hakim said on Saturday that Bijon Setu was not going to be closed immediately because “this is wedding season”. Hakim added that the authorities would look for a date in January to close the 500-metre-long bridge that was built in the early 70s.

Some engineers wondered if the repeated postponement of the health study of the bridge was a good thing to do for the authorities. Police officers and engineers of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA) had said that they were anticipating a shutdown of Bijon Setu on a weekend this week or the next. The shutdown is necessary to carry out load test of the bridge that would help determine how much load the bridge is able to withstand without breaking under its weight.

“We cannot close Bijon Setu now because this is the wedding season,” Hakim, who is also the state urban development minister and the chairman of CMDA, the custodian of Bijon Setu. “We will look for dates in January,” he added.

The wedding season sees Gariahat, a sari hub, teeming with shoppers. If Bijon Setu is shut then traffic in and around Gariahat is likely to get affected severely, said police officers.

But Calcutta lives from one festival to another. So, will Bijon Setu ever be free for a test? A police officer agreed. A shutdown of Bijon Setu, whenever that happens, will trigger traffic snarls and inconvenience commuters, he said.

As part of an ongoing health study, the CMDA has already conducted some tests of the bridge. The load test, for which the closure is necessary, is another crucial test to study the health of the bridge. A civil engineer said that the results of the load test would help substantiate the findings from the other tests.

Engineers, who have inspected Bijon Setu, said that chunks of concrete had fallen off the bridge’s underbelly at several places, exposing the steel reinforcements. Besides growth of trees, whose roots penetrated inside concrete, was also noticed in some places. Both the irregularities can damage the concrete and reduce its strength.

Metro reported in September that the authorities had then put off a plan to conduct the load test of the bridge as they did not want to inconvenience shoppers ahead of Puja. A closure of Bijon Setu is likely to have far reaching effects on city’s traffic and the authorities did not want a traffic mess a few weeks before Puja when a lot of people throng Gariahat.

An engineer involved in the maintenance of elevated corridors said that the authorities should give top priority to the load test since it involved the question of safety and security of thousands of people who used. “Public utilities should get the top priority,” he said.

An engineer, who is part of advisory committee set up by the state urban development department to conduct health studies of bridges, told Metro that preliminary assessment of the bridge did not reveal anything alarming about it.

“The bridge is not in a bad condition but the shops and stores under it are in very poor state. A wall of a portion of these stores can collapse any time,” said the engineer.