Following the end of an event-filled Transport Month in October, the Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) continued with service delivery through its regional monthly service delivery Blitz, with one being held in Region C on Thursday, 21 November 2019.
The blitz, which means visible service delivery on road surface defects in a chosen area, mainly concentrated in Cosmo City. Teams from surrounding depots joined in pothole patching and unblocking stormwater drains. Other depots assisted in various parts of Region C with skoffelling and road markings. Other teams active in the area focused on KI Cleaning also in Ward 100, at Cnr Angola and Kenya.
Region C Depot Manager Erick Tshikudzo said: “The purpose today is to deal with the backlog we have due to the high number of service requests in reactive maintenance in this region. We have a challenge in Cosmo City, which does not have proper stormwater channel.
“This means more damage on the roads as water is an enemy of the road. For example, there are many holes on the roads due to illegal car washes at every corner, found more commonly on the lowest point of the road, making the water run on the road, as there are no stormwater channels.
“This challenge is due to there being not enough budget to reconstruct the roads, like here at corner Adis Abab and Tunis streets in Cosmo City, we will keep patching the road until we have enough budget to reconstruct,” he said.
Tshikudzo added that Region C was inundated with service requests. It has 18 wards and 155 suburbs and only 18 urban inspectors and two at JRA for the entire region. Approximately 115 service requests are received a day.
“Our inspectors can cover roughly 40y service requests in a day, just to inspect. According to the number of service requests, it is evident that Region C has faced some challenges in recent months, though there is a lot the JRA is doing in the region, there is still a lot to be done.”
Sizwe Nxumalo, an Urban Inspector based at Roodepoort Civic Centre, said: “The overcrowding is a big challenge here especially in Extention 6 of Ward 100. The community no longer follows the bylaws, hence the high number of challenges. The key thing is that the community is not well informed about infrastructure and how to take care of it. Dumping is not allowed in stormwater drains but it happens.”
Another big challenge in the region and impacting on roads was silt. Nxumalo said sand runs onto road structures especially after rain. This problem is common in other areas of Region C, especially Tshepisong.
