Roadworks on R61 frustrate motorists
Not only are these roadworks inconvenient but they are a dangerous hazard as well
Ongoing road construction on the R61 between Southbroom and Port Edward is frustrating locals and visitors to the South Coast.
Almost one year into the project, the public is getting impatient and has good reason too.
Not only are these roadworks inconvenient but they are a dangerous hazard as well, putting motorists at risk of possible accidents.
For some the daily commute to work has become a nuisance, and even parents battle to navigate in and out the maze of road construction equipment to get their children to and from school.
According to Ken Gaze, a prominent figure from Ramsgate, these roadworks haven’t been supervised properly.
“There is no accountability and someone must be profiting from this behind closed doors. Evidence to support this is that these roads were apparently never in a bad condition to begin with,” he said.
The road works have also “been done in a very haphazard way, often nothing happening at all even in good weather”.
“Currently there are roughly some nine kilometres of traffic restriction on various sections of the road and only about one kilometre of actual repair work being done,” according to Gaze.
South African National Roads Agency’s (Sanral) Eastern Region Project Manager, Mpho Nephembani said that due to the nature of the work, repairs had to be done in stages – recycling, asphalt patching, slurry and sealing.
“It is not a simple mill and replace where it can start at one end and continue to the other end of the project.”
The contractor is Raubex KZN (Pty) Ltd. “There is a contract between Sanral and Raubex KZN (Pty) Ltd and payment is done for work completed,” said Nephembani.
Nephembani stated that “periodic maintenance of the road was necessary as a holding action in order to ensure that the road will remain functional until it is upgraded in the future. Failures began to develop over the length of the project, with the most severe between the Mtamvuna River and the Munster intersection.”
One of the reasons for the delay, Nephembani said is that “the local quarries could not supply the contractor with the correct materials at the beginning of the project, forcing the contractor to obtain aggregates from Kokstad and Durban. This in turn caused delays. The gradings of certain materials caused other delays until recently.”
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