Westville residents witness the demolition of the Lancaster Road Bridge

WESTVILLE residents Terry Haywood and Nicola Jenvey tell of their experience of witnessing the demolition of the Lancaster Road Bridge this weekend.

As SANRAL announced the demolition of both the St James (Spine Road) Eastern Bridge structure and the Lancaster Road Bridge, as part of the construction processes for N3 road upgrades between the Westville Viaduct and the Paradise Valley Interchange, this resulted in the closure of the N3 from 17:00 on March 23 to 04:00 on March 25.

Also read: SANRAL announces N3 road closure from March 23 to 25

The Westville couple, Haywood and Jenvey, not only got the chance to witness this demolition; they also got to capture this moment and were happy to share it with Highway Mail.

The couple are professional media hounds with Haywood spending 35 years as a photographer for The Mercury before his retirement in 2012 and Jenvey as a financial journalist and editor since 1992.

The couple said that news is in their blood, and the demolition of the Lancaster Road Bridge was not an opportunity to be missed.

“Its demise will affect our route into central Westville for at least the next year so watching how the upgrade process happened also held personal interest,” they said.

The couple lives in Kew Avenue, about 1km from the bridge as the crow flies, and could hear the jackhammers involved in the process throughout the Saturday and Sunday nights. While not disturbingly loud, they both commented they were pleased not to be living in any of the properties along Lancaster Terrace overlooking the N3 national freeway whose residents likely would have been kept awake the whole weekend.

“Even standing near the bridge for the short time we did was enough to shatter our nerves. Terry came away with a headache from the electronic thudding,” Jenvey said.

Also read: Take note of road closures for Amashova cycle race

Haywood’s experience meant he sought the ideal view to demonstrate how the demolition worked, and he captured the images from the Maryvale Road rather than the Ferndale Avenue side of Lancaster Terrace as this provided photographs not obstructed by the afternoon sunlight but still showing the jackhammers in operation.

Jenvey described the viewing as ‘emotional – something to be remembered for life’.

“I remember the demolition of the Pinetown water towers when I was still at school in the 1980s and rarely drive down Fields Hill without thinking of their imposing bulk. The same will apply to the bridge. I have lived in Westville/Cowies Hill for more than 40 years and driven over that bridge thousands of times. To see it as a heap of concrete and twisted steel rods had me marvelling at the engineering skills demanded and in awe of how solidly infrastructure was built then and presumably today albeit techniques may have changed,” she said.

She added that it was interesting that the bridge was not demolished in a single explosion but jackhammered from the bridge ends over the N3 and allowed to fall onto the thick bed of sand laid across the national freeway. The structure was pounded into concrete sections and removed with each dismantle of concrete revealing the increasingly complex web of steel that formed the structure’s intestinal strength.

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