Community Issues & Debates
Focussing on issues affecting Fish Hoek, Muizenberg, Simon’s Town, Kalk Bay, St James, Kommetjie, Noordhoek, Ocean View, Masiphumelele, Glencairn and Clovelly
SOUTH AFRICAN ROADS: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH.
Traffic issues affect everybody, whether you drive or not.
The current issue of the AA (Automobile Association) Mobility Magazine carries some startling road accident statistics which need to be understood by all who use the roads. The statistics below provide a feel of what all South African motorists are up against.
*Approximately 14,500 people died in road accidents in the year 2008.
*The estimated cost of all vehicle crashes to the South African economy was R56billion. This represents approximately 3.5% of GDP. By comparison, the cost of crashes in developed countries is much lower, at only about 1%.
*We are all at fault. Almost 85% of crashes are as a result of human error (or more accurately, by the road user breaking the traffic law). Examples: a pedestrian crossing a busy motorway, a driver overtaking on the solid white line, excessive speeding, driving under the influence of alcohol, ignoring red traffic lights and reckless driving in general.
*10% of crashes can be attributed to poor road conditions. This is because many of the provincial roads in South Africa have seriously deteriorated over the past few years. The maintenance backlog on our roads has been conservatively estimated at R100 billion. In developed countries less than 5% of crashes are attributed to poor road conditions.
*It is believed that a minimum of about 5% of all crashes are because of unroadworthy vehicles and mechanical failure. The average age of cars on our roads is about 11 years, while the average age of trucks and buses is about 20 years!
*The absence of periodic vehicle testing makes older vehicles more likely to be unroadworthy and more susceptible to critical safety component failure in the event of a crash.
*The lack of competency of drivers. There are almost 8 million licensed drivers, many of whom have had very little training. Inexperience certainly plays a major role in the number of crashes recorded each year.
The AA states that it is very actively involved in numerous road safety initiatives. Some of the many legislative amendments being lobbied include the seat belt laws regarding children, compulsory daytime running lights and reducing the alcohol limits to zero.
(Extract from Fish Hoek Valley R & R A AGM Agenda. Info Source: AA Mobility Magazine).
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CAPE OF FIRE – CALL TO ACTION
by Steve Coe – November 2009
ALIENS! FIRE! ALIENS! FIRE! ALIENS! FIRE! ALIENS!
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The Cape Peninsula is blessed by a stunningly beautiful mountain mass that towers spectacularly above the waters of the Southern Ocean. This wonderful aspect, much admired by early European voyagers from their sailing ships, gave us our claim to be the “Fairest Cape in all the World”. However this blessing of nature instantly turns into a terrible curse, whenever a single spark ignites the tangled masses of alien vegetation that indifference and lack of foresight have allowed to replace so much of our indigenous mountain flora.
The situation has never been worse – everywhere we look, we see masses of invasive vegetation encroaching right into our suburbs, tangles of vegetation choking undeveloped properties and rampant alien plants overhanging suburban roads and fences. Besides the fire risk, these dense thickets also provide wonderful hiding places for criminals. The City authorities, the Province, the Navy, the Department of Public Works, Cape Nature and a host of other landowners and private land speculators all have the legal responsibility and obligation to remove this threat. But what are they doing? With very few exceptions – virtually nothing!
BE AFRAID – BE VERY AFRAID! Unless something is done to sort out this problem, one day soon, a howling South-Easter is going to sweep an unstoppable raging fire storm right through the middle of one of our sleepy suburbs, with huge loss of property and even of human life! This has already happened, on a limited scale, in Scarborough last year, with five houses lost and many more homes destroyed at the Red Hill informal settlement. Again there was a huge fire above the City bowl earlier this year. On our TV screens we recently saw California in flames and earlier watched horrific scenes of devastation, when fires took out whole suburbs and villages in Australia, leaving around 200 people dead! Don’t fool yourself – the next major fire disaster could be right here in the South Peninsula. THINK! – Your neighbour’s overgrown plot could be the cause of you losing your home and even members of your family in a runaway fire! So what are you going to do about it? Do you have invasive alien plants on your land? Does your neighbour? We are approaching the fire season now and something must be very soon, as the Southeaster brings the threat of fire back to us!
Its strange – somehow the authorities can always seem to find the money and resources for the high profile task of fire fighting – and thank God they do! Whenever there is a fire they manage to send in hosts of fire engines, numbers of expensive helicopters and hordes of brave fire fighters. They do a great job! But why are these same authorities always pleading an almost total lack of budget, as an excuse for neglecting the less sexy but extremely cost effective task of fire prevention?
The logic is skewed – without the Alien vegetation, the fires would be less frequent, not so intense and far easier to contain and so the fire-fighting costs would be proportionately far less. A day’s fire-fighting can cost anywhere upwards of R1.5 million (fire fighting helicopters each cost around R36 000 per hour). You can clear a lot of vegetation for R1.5 million!
Think about it – and then take the trouble to personably put the obvious question to the City authorities! If all of us did that – maybe the council would allocate something reasonable in the next budget for Bush Clearing
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OVERGROWN SUBURBAN ROAD VERGES – FIRE HAZARDS AT YOUR DOORSTEP |
We have to act as a community to call to task the City of Cape Town (CoCT) to get rid of these invaders. As the statutory body the City has the primary duty for enforcing the statutes and bylaws and the legal responsibility for keeping the villages and suburbs at the urban edge safe from fires. We must demand that the City officials be given the resources to do the job that we pay them for and insist that they: –
a) Immediately clear ALL City owned land, including highway road, reserves, undeveloped plots, suburban road verges, firebreaks, servitudes and other categories of land under their direct control. And most important –maintain their properties, once cleared.
b) Prosecute to the full extent of the law all intransigent land owners, (whoever they are), who have been allowed to let their land become overrun with invasive plants. There are already adequate laws on the statute books to enforce this – all it needs is the determination to go all the way through the courts if necessary and a total resolve to never grant any concessions or exemptions whatsoever to landowners that might allow them to delay any of the clearing of their plots. (Such concessions in the past have been used to postpone bush clearing indefinitely).
In Glencairn, through the neighbourhood fire watch, surveys have been made of overgrown plots and these have been submitted to the City for action. To give CoCT credit, they have always reacted promptly and served notices on the owners immediately. Having been warned, if the owners do not clear their land, the City will do it for them – at the landowner’s cost! It was reported at the November sub-council meeting that the City commonly charges around R50 000 to clear a normal sized plot – but the owner could actually clear it for a fraction of this if they use a private contractor – or did it themselves. So landowners be warned and ignore the Council’s notices at your peril ! However in many cases just the threat of council action has been sufficient to promote action and in Glencairn we already have seen positive results as many overgrown erven have now been cleared by their owners.
Sadly, the success in getting some private land cleared in Glencairn has not yet extended to the properties of the two largest land speculators in the valley and steps have had to be taken to prosecute. Nor has any headway been made against the blatant neglect of the State land entrusted jointly to the Navy and to the Public Works Department, who both flagrantly break the law with impunity and ignore all calls to clear their land of invasive alien plants – thereby putting several communities at risk. To overcome City inertia, we need to speak with a much louder voice.So please help by trying to persuade your own local community organisations, forums, neighbourhood watches, civic and ratepayers associations etc to start writing to the Councillors and City Officials to demand that action be taken about bush clearing – now! An equally effective route would be for individuals and organisations to use the opportunity to put searching questions directly to the Councillors at the “public question time”, allocated for hearing community concerns, at the monthly South Peninsula Sub-Council meetings. The Councillors are duty-bound to give a reply and thus cannot duck any issue that you raise! As the DAnow controls both the City and the Province, there is no doubt that they could make a meaningful impression on this problem – if they have the political will to do so. A well structured alien clearing programme would also create numerous jobs for unemployed people. Please help to make them realise how important these issues are. The CAPE OF FIRE website was set up to help South Peninsula communities and individuals understand these issues and to make it easy to identify the most common invasive alien plant species. It is primarily aimed at creating awareness of the link between alien invasive plants and runaway wildfires and to give practical advice on eradicating this menace on private land, together with instruction about how to make homes fire safe. You can Google the words, Cape of Fire, or otherwise go directly to the web address shown below : -
www.southerncrossroads.info/community/cape-of-fire.php
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