Wow! There’s something going horribly wrong with tyres, retreads or the in-service operational management of them in this country. Gideon Cloete, Incident Management Systems Manager for the N3TC, sent us the accompanying photographs of heaps of scrap tyres and tyre treads.
No, the N3TC has not gone into the scrap tyre collection business. Rather, these are the tyres and tyre treads picked up on the N3 during 2010 by the company’s route services patrolmen who removed 10 410 tyre treads from about 420 km of the N3. They are stockpiled at Schaaprand.
According to Cloete, several crashes occurred when drivers took evasive action to avoid a piece of rubber on the road and many vehicles were extensively damaged when the driver hit a piece of truck tyre, especially at night. Looking at the photographs, it seems there is a lot of good tread there. So who’s not doing things right? The new tyre manufacturers, the retreaders or the operators?
We’ll try find out and come back to our readers on this one. It just doesn’t look right to us. That’s heaps of money lying there.
