The City of Cape Town has revealed the mense behind the damage to Jakes Gerwel Drive at Viking Road were excavating material to build informal housing and were living in man-made caves.
Last week, concerned motorists noticed a large crack in the road near the bridge and alerted authorities.
“People were excavating the fill from under the bridge approach slab. We are not sure why, but suspect it was to use the material to build platforms for informal housing, or to use the sand for construction purposes,” said Councillor Rob Quintas, Mayoral Committee Member for Urban Mobility.
“There also appeared to be people living inside the “caves” that were created by the excavations. Without the support of the fill material under the slab, the slab started moving, with extremely high risk of collapse.”
Quintas added that work on the broken road is progressing steadily while plans for a more permanent solution is underway.
“Up until now, emergency work has been completed on two lanes and emergency repairs continue on the other two lanes. The large voids created under the slab by the illegal excavations have been backfilled with materials to provide support for the slab and make it safe.”
He said a final solution, including creating hard surfaces to make future illegal excavations more difficult, is still being looked at.
“This kind of illegal activity has potential disastrous consequences if it causes a collapse in the road. While the actual bridge structure is not affected, the approach to the bridge has been undermined,” he explained.
“The void was estimated to be about 120 cubic meters in size, and if the approach slab collapsed into the void, the hole in the road would be very large.”
genevieve.heunis@inl.co.za