Residents turn to fixing road themselves
"We did not want anyone to go through what we have gone through. These ruts are big enough to damage a vehicle. Someone could even get hurt."
When their vehicle got stuck on the badly rutted road to the Sibongile dumping site, they decided to fix the potholes themselves.
Jimmy Mulhatton and a group of his colleagues, who run a garden refuse removal service, said that with the recent heavy storms they had seen the ruts in the gravel road ‘grow deeper every day’.
“No one bothered about the road even though many people – even municipal vehicles – use this road every day to go to the refuse site.
“Our bakkie got stuck and we had to dig it out,” he told the Courier.
Once they had freed their bakkie, Jimmy and friends decided to fix the ruts the best they could.
“We did not want anyone to go through what we have gone through. These ruts are big enough to damage a vehicle. Someone could even get hurt.”
Taking the example of Ingagane residents, outside Newcastle, who recently decided to paint the street signs themselves after the municipality refused to do it for them, Jimmy and his friends have certainly shown what can be done when communities ‘do it for themselves’.
