Additional police are to be deployed to the area surrounding the construction site of a new interchange over the N2 in Durban.
|||Additional police are to be deployed to the area surrounding the construction site of a new interchange over the N2 in Durban which will link Umgeni Road with Reservoir Hills and Newlands.
Metro police spokesman Eugene Msomi said this was decided at a meeting yesterday after The Mercury published an article in which Springfield business owners expressed concern about traffic congestion and increased crime around the construction site.
Msomi said police had received numerous reports of crime in the area and, as of Monday, four uniformed and two plainclothes police officers as well as a police van would |be stationed there.
He said a team of pointsmen had already been deployed to ease traffic flow.
The SA National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) expected work on the interchange to be completed by mid-2014.
Challenges
The multimillion-rand project began in March 2011 and was originally expected to take more than 30 months. But the agency’s design and construction manager for the eastern region, Ravi Ronny, said the completion date had been pushed back because of several unexpected challenges.
Ronny said “service relocation” had posed a problem.
“There are a number of businesses in the area,” he said, “and when we began work on the project we discovered we had to move more electrical and fibre-optic cables as well as water and sewer lines than we had originally anticipated.”
There was also a house in the south-west quadrant of the construction site that had had to be expropriated, explained Ronny.
“It had been leased and then sub-leased, so there were a lot of people living on the property for whom we had to find alternative accommodation,” he said.
The municipality assisted Sanral, but it was a lengthy process.
Ronny also cited the heavy rainfall experienced late last year as well as “labour issues” between contractor Rumdel Cape and its workers as delaying factors. - The Mercury