Harsh Rathod was studying at the University of Victoria when a disaster 12,000 kilometres away set his career path in stone—or at least in concrete.
Harsh Rathod was studying at the University of Victoria when a disaster 12,000 kilometres away set his career path in stone—or at least in concrete.
The civil engineering PhD candidate was developing new technologies to assess the structural integrity of aging bridges and dams when he heard that a 100-year-old bridge had been swept away by the flooding Savitri River in India. The bridge on the busy Mumbai-Goa highway was part of the daily commute for his family members. He stopped everything and picked up the phone.
The 2016 disaster claimed close to 30 lives but no members of his family were among the dead. Still, it was too close to home. He hit pause on his research to find out what happened. He discovered that the bridge had collapsed due to lack of proper inspection.
“As soon as I heard that, I felt extremely angry and didn’t know what to do,” Rathod says. The bridge had already been twinned with a modern replacement, but the colonial-era bridge was still in use.
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Image via University of Victoria.
