Johannesburg – Joburg’s roads and pavements are being stripped on a daily basis, leaving ratepayers to foot a R57 million annual damages bill.
The entire stretch of the M2 East and West has been stripped of all metals from the guard rails to the bridge expansion joints.
The thieves move along the highway, setting up temporary homes under some of the bridges to be close to their “workplaces”.
The Johannesburg Roads Agency (JRA) has discovered numerous places in which people have lived along the route. There are also signs of fires, lit to strip the paint off the overhead directional signs.
Now that these two stretches of highway have been depleted of all metal, the vandals have moved on to the M1 North.
The JRA took the media on a tour to reveal the extent of the vandalism, which Chris Bruyns, JRA’s manager of traffic signals, described as “rampant and devastating”.
A trip along the M2 East and West shows most of the bridges have no railings or guard rails, many of the large overhead road signs have been removed, gantries demolished, stormwater drain slabs removed and traffic signal equipment stolen…
South Africa Today – South Africa News
