Good progress is being made on a Department of Infrastructure (DOI) project to repair flood damage on five roads in the Garden Route District. Major repairs are being done on a 10 km stretch of Main Road (MR) 355, also known as the Seven Passes Road, between George and Knysna. Repairs are also underway on DR (District Road) 1602 (Jonkersberg), DR6133 and DR1639 near George, as well as DR1602 near Plettenberg Bay.
“If all goes according to plan, the project is expected to be complete by mid-2027. Portions of Seven Passes Road (MR355) under repair are active construction sites and are closed until the project is complete. This is for safety reasons, and also to mitigate the risk that damaged portions of the road completely fail. If the road fails, the Seven Passes Road will have to be closed for an indefinite period,” said Jandré Bakker, DOI Director for Operational Support. “It remains the aim of the project team to, when possible, open the roads but under traffic accommodation, often referred to as stop-and-go points. This will not be on a scheduled basis and may be closed without prior notice so road users should consider this road completely closed until the project is completed. Should the situation change, a formal announcement will be made by,” he continued.
Provincial Minister Tertuis Simmers added, “Certain motorists have been ignoring the road closure signs on Seven Passes Road. This is unlawful. Hard barriers and closures may be put in place where there are road closures. This is, however, a last resort because the contractors require access for construction processes, and this impedes the speed of construction. Motorists who unlawfully ignore road closure signs are creating unnecessary risks. They are further impacting the ultimate timeline of the project. We will not hesitate to do a hard closure should road users, which include cyclists and pedestrians, continue to unlawfully use the closed sections.”
So far, works on MR355 have included the building of retaining walls, piled foundations and concrete decks, and road and pavement layer works. Works currently underway on MR355 include replacing five culverts, replacing pipes with larger ones, repairing road slips in seven locations, and repairing the balustrades of two bridges. Causeways that failed are currently being replaced on DR1633, DR1639 and DR1791. A new bridge is being built on DR1602 to replace a low water structure that failed.
Minister Simmers said, “it is envisaged that this project will create 11 500 person-days of work and 135 work opportunities, and six local enterprises will be subcontracted to perform repair work.”
Bakker added, “R17.7 million will be spent on procurement from targeted enterprises on this project. By the time these repairs are complete, we expect to have invested a total of R61 million in the Garden Route District on these flood-related repairs”.
Pepper Prada
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Tacklebox
Elon Musk was born in South Africa, and made an electric car. What if he had been born in Madagascar?
He would have made a gas car