Ripple effect: Thick Traffic chokes Bengaluru's Kundalahalli Main Road

Bengaluru: Traffic chugged and crawled along on Kundalahalli Main Road on Friday owing to an explosion that occurred at the popular Rameshwaram Cafe at Brookefield. 

The blast that occurred between 1.30 pm and 2 pm, according to police reports, injured a total of nine people.

The cafe is situated on a road that serves as a crucial link connecting the HAL Old Airport Road and Brookefield to the Seetharam Palya and Kundalahalli metro stations, Hoodi and beyond. 

Immediately, curious onlookers flooded the road that is lined with residential homes and apartments, corporate offices, and shopping areas, as fire tenders, ambulances and police vehicles rushed to the spot, choking the road. Emergency service vehicles had to squeeze their way through the slow-moving traffic to get to the spot.

Slow-moving traffic was reported till Kundalahalli metro station, which is about 1.6 km away from the cafe, throughout most of the afternoon and evening. “Traffic is inching very slowly; the vehicles are barely moving. It took me a while to get an auto-rickshaw to cross this stretch of the road,” said Sharadha, a private firm employee passing by the area.

Ajay Kumar, 30, a security guard at a building about 250 metres away from the cafe, told DH that the traffic stagnated for a good 30 to 40 minutes after the blast. A student named Akshay Kumar said that while the cafe premises is normally very crowded, there were easily about a 100 people when the blast occurred.

“The traffic situation has become very bad here,” he said. 

Kuldeep Kumar Jain, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Traffic East), told DH, that the traffic has since moved slowly but hasn’t come to a standstill. “We had not issued any diversions but we deployed a  sub-inspector with two constables. The inspector has also visited the spot.”

He added that he doesn’t expect any issues with traffic movement on Saturday, despite the weekend crowd, since the regular office crowd would not contribute to any peak hour traffic issues normally seen during the weekdays.