Councillor Deppe refuses to sign off on shoddy road works
PAULSHOF - WARD 93 councillor, Annette Deppe took a construction company to task for doing shoddy work in her ward.
The handing over of a R48-million road intersection site at the corner of Witkoppen and Umhlanga roads in Paulshof was postponed to an unspecified date after Deppe refused to sign off the project on behalf of the community. Deppe cried foul over the quality of work done by GMH Tswelelo Consulting Engineers which she described as ‘poor’.
“I need correct road markings, guardrails and signage, and the site to be cleaned before I can off sign off the project,” fumed Deppe.
After an inspection of the intersection, engineer, Rida Jaffer of GMH Tswelelo Consulting Engineers conceded that their work was not up to scratch.
Fourways Review news team was at the site inspection meeting attended by Jaffer; a representative from the Department of Road and Transport, William Hlabangwane; Community Liaison Officer Terrence Mukona and Deppe.
“The traffic island is wrongly placed in the middle of a lane and there are no road signs to warn motorists about left turns,” said Deppe to Jaffer during a heated site inspection meeting.
Deppe also pointed out that the constructor forgot to put a set of robots on the one side of the intersection. Also, there was a set of traffic lights that had not been switched on.
“Can you imagine that there are no robots facing East on the other side of the road, and this is just so wrong by any standard,” said Deppe.
Deppe added that the constructor must realign the road markings before handing over the site to the provincial government.
Jaffer apportioned blame to the designers of the site, who he declined to identify. He said his company only implemented the plan they were supplied, which he described as ‘defective’.
“The plan of the site we were given by another company was worse than what Deppe is complaining about now,” said Jaffer.
“We had to redesign it because it was defective, but also note that we did not have the mandate to change a lot of things.”
He promised to rectify all the legitimate complaints which Deppe had raised.
Jaffer said the Johannesburg Roads Agency was responsible for switching on the traffic lights. Bertha Peters-Scheepers of the agency said the robots had been incapacitated by copper cable theft.
“There is too much cable theft in Johannesburg and we have subcontracted someone to replace the cables on that robot,” said Peters-Scheepers.
Do constructors clean-up sites after completing their projects. Share your observations in the comments section below
