Saving Konark, with old Roman formula and Welsh expertise

Cintec, which has carried out restoration work at Windsor castle and Buckingham Palace as well as at historic mosques in Cairo, has also proposed restoring two Hindu temples in Baramulla district of J&K. The temples known as Bunihar and Datta Mandir are in precarious condition, Swift said. “These are old, unique temples, the idea is to stop further collapse. They don’t want to lose them forever.”

Swift is a member of the delegation that also include business representatives from the education, food processing, film making, engineering and heritage design and manufacturing sectors of the Welsh economy.

Speaking of the work that his company hopes to carry out at Konark and other temples, Swift told The Indian Express: “In Konark, the building is in a very bad condition, there are stones missing. It’s feeling the effects of seismic events and just crumbling over the years and age.”

“A long time ago the solution was to fill up the inside with sand to support the outside wall, inside of the temple. The idea for us is to remove that sand without further collapse. But in order to remove the sand you have to stabilise the outside walls first, for which we have come up with proposals. There are a few different proposals.”

“The uniqueness of our system is that you won’t even know the reinforcement is in there. Stones are removed, the reinforcement is reinserted and then we put the stones back in, so it’s a skeleton within there that you don’t know,” he said.

“It’s replacing a scaffolding that’s been there a long time and they want to take that down to open it up to the visitors again. So in order to remove that scaffolding, we’re proposing to put a skeleton within that structure, so there’s no need for the scaffolding.”

“The skeleton will consist of stainless steel bars, a unique structure manufactured by our system based on old Roman formulas. It’s based on the old ways of doing it.”

“In certain areas, we will match mortars so that they can analyse the mortars and we will replace it with like for like so you are not introducing a new modern thing into an old structure.”

“We will actually diamond drill holes within the structure — some of them are 15 metres long — then we’ll insert these stainless steel rods within those diamond drill holes, inflate it with a cementatious grout. We will actually inject the grout into it.”

“Our system has a fabric sleeve around it, so you’re not just pumping grout and filling up the temple. Once that’s inflated and cured, you put the stone back into the hole.”

“Computer models have been done of this temple to analyse the weak areas, so we’ll only put reinforcement into areas that need it. We don’t want to drill holes everywhere and just put steel in for the sake of putting in steel. These computer models highlight the stress points within the temple, so we reinforce the stress points, so you limit the amount of steel you put in because of the computer modelling and that’s basically it.”