A slip road that was built by the Johannesburg Roads Agency to alleviate traffic on Louis Botha Avenue has been left in ruins just months after it was completed.
The project, intended to join Louis Botha Avenue and Cavendish Road, had been officially signed off by the agency as complete. However, Joburg Water needed to dig up the road when the water supply was interrupted and the road has not yet been repaired.
A resident who lives at the bottom of Cavendish Road has complained about the state of the road. Ian Levinson spoke to the Rosebank Killarney Gazette and said, “They were working there one day and then out of the blue it was abandoned! At first we thought it wasn’t too be bad and we could live with it.”
However, Levinson added that it had now been about two months since the road was abandoned and nothing had been done to remove any of the rubble or blockades.
Electronic speed cameras tossed and officers back on the road
Phumla Mkhize of the agency explained, “The whole idea is to channel traffic from Louis Botha up this slip road eventually. There was a Johannesburg Water line traversing through here and after the contractors had done whatever work they had to do, Johannesburg Water came afterwards and dug it up so that is the issue now.”
Molahlehi Isaac Morate, an engineer for the agency said, “It’s a completely new road; we only handed it over two months ago and then they [Joburg Water] came and dug up afterwards. Now we’re going to end up spending money that was meant to be used somewhere else to repair a road we already paid for.”
According to Eleanor Mavimbela, the external communications officer for Joburg Water, the contractor who was working on the road covered Joburg Water valves with asphalt.
“This resulted in our valves being damaged, causing an interruption to water supply to the upper Houghton area,” she said. “We then needed to repair the valve to restore water supply and therefore the road needed to be dug up in order for the repairs to be done.”
Mavimbela added that a request had been lodged with Johannesburg Roads Agency to assist with reinstating the road.
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