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Council concerned over ‘shoddy’ trenches

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BULAWAYO city council has expressed concern at “road trenching” by several companies laying cables in the central business district, saying they did not meet the municipality’s standards.

BULAWAYO city council has expressed concern at “road trenching” by several companies laying cables in the central business district, saying they did not meet the municipality’s standards.

Blondie Ndebele

Several companies, mostly in the telecommunication sector, have been digging trenches in the city laying power cables. However, the local authority said the repairs on the dug-up roads were poorly done.

According to the latest council minutes, the road surface was not level and badly done and as a result inconvenienced motorists and pedestrians in the city. “Most of the companies, after trenching, failed to repair the roads properly and some of these companies take long to finish their work,” read minutes of the environmental management and engineering services committee.

The council said it was monitoring and examining the works on the roads and realised that companies that were trenching the roads were not complying with their laid down policy to restore the streets to their original  state.

Power utility company — Zesa — which has been trenching on the roads for more than five months for their CBD-33kv upgrading project — is one of the companies cited as having failed to repair the roads back to the state they found them in.

“Zesa had repaired Fife Street, but the repairs did not comply with the requirements,” read the minutes.

“They have since contracted another private company to do the repairs.” The municipality, however, noted that the reason for delays in the Zesa project was that the power utility had to dig 500-metre long stretches at a time.