What does it take to maintain, manage and improve a clean and well-functioning urban environment? City Views spent a morning with one of the two CCID road maintenance teams to get the lowdown.
Despite the fact that Table Mountain is covered under a rolling cloth of mist, and low grey clouds shower the Central City with intermittent bursts of rain, the CCID maintenance teams are at work. At 07h30 the three-man team headed up by foreman Obey Togarepi walk their trolley, equipped with material and tools from the Straatwerk depot in Bo-Kaap, to their first job of the day, at the Cape Sun Hotel. On today’s job card: the removal of three disused bollard bases from the paved walking surface to ensure they don’t trip up distracted pedestrians.
Obey explains that he worked himself up through the ranks of the Straatwerk programme to become foreman of one of the cleaning teams, and has been leading a team for the past six years. Working alongside him, Gaylord Mabaya and Malibongwe Mgu quickly form a production line removing pavers, digging up the concrete footing of the bollards, replacing and levelling the sand, cleaning bricks and seamlessly repaving the surface. Using basic tools and elbow grease, they make quick work of it and by the time they’re done you would be none the wiser that there was ever a potential problem area here.
So successful has the road maintenance team been that the City of Cape Town has asked the team, through the CCID, to take responsibility for all the labour involved in minor road maintenance projects within the CCID area.
More than road maintenance
But more than just road maintenance, the urban management team tackles a whole host of odd jobs that add up to a mammoth collective effort. Over the course of last year, Straatwerk repaired the roads in the CBD in 1 860 places, removed 1 519 pieces of graffiti, and collected 10.92 tons of debris from municipal drains as well as 10 tons of waste through the provision of gardening services.
“If you look at Cape Town and you compare it with other cities when you travel, it is totally different. You can see that not even one brick is out of place here, because if one brick is broken we’re already there fixing it,” says Obey.
And for him the work never stops: “It’s doesn’t matter if I’m here on a Saturday or a Sunday walking with my family: although they can’t see what I’m thinking about, I am always looking and making notes of things that I see. Especially over weekends when there aren’t so many cars parked everywhere, you see things that you don’t notice during the week. Whether I am going home or coming to work, I am always at work.”
Follow us on Twitter at @CapeTownCCID, keep our email address handy (info@capetownccid.org), and make us aware of areas in the Central City that need our help.
This article first appeared in the February 2012 issue of City Views. Read it online.
Words: Alma Viviers
Photo: Lisa Burnell