For almost 50 years, Cape Town has had a freeway that stops dead in mid air. Now the City wants to finish it.

Then some genuinely good news for anyone who has been chasing steel. A brand new rolling mill just opened in Gqeberha.

Diesel has roughly doubled this year, so we have a few ways to spend less of your profit on the road between sites.

And the most famous construction mistake in the world turns out to have been saved by a war. Sort of.

Edition 20. Let us not leave this one unfinished.

Let’s build better. 👇

What's hot. What's moving. What you need to know.

After nearly 50 years in mid air, the City has unveiled a plan to finish the job.

If you have driven into Cape Town, you have seen it. A freeway that sails out over the Foreshore and simply stops, mid air. The scheme was dreamed up in the late 1960s, building started in the early 1970s, and work stopped in 1977, when the money ran out.

Let us bust a myth while we are here. The popular story is that the 2 sides were built wrong and never lined up. The accepted explanation is far less dramatic. The budget dried up, priorities moved on, and nobody went back.

In the meantime, the bridge built itself a second career in showbiz. It has starred in adverts, music videos, and an episode of Black Mirror. One famous 2010 insurance ad had friends reversing all the way from Johannesburg to Cape Town, only to drive straight off the end.

On 2 October, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis stood on one of the bridges to unveil the Foreshore Precinct Project. It proposes a new link bridge and an underground tunnel to ease the congestion at the bottom of Buitengracht Street, plus a promenade and a new neighbourhood on 15 hectares of land that has sat idle for decades, including affordable housing.

Before anyone orders formwork, it is still a proposal. The cost has not been set, public participation starts in the coming months, and the City expects construction to take the best part of a decade, done in 2 phases so the existing freeways stay open.

Not everyone is cheering either. Some critics argue the money would do more for congestion if it went into rail and public transport, rather than getting cars to a bottleneck faster.

For the trade, a decade long bridge, tunnel, and new neighbourhood in the middle of a CBD is a serious pipeline of civils, structural, and building work. Watch for the public participation process if you want to know where it is heading.

1977 called. It would like its bridge finished.

Scrap metal goes in one end, rebar and angles come out the other.

A few weeks ago we covered fabricators struggling to get long steel after ArcelorMittal South Africa closed its Newcastle operations. This week, some supply is heading the other way.

On 20 October, Coega Steels opened a R360 million rolling mill in the Coega Special Economic Zone outside Gqeberha, part of a R500 million expansion that takes total investment on the site to R1.5 billion.

The mill can produce up to 150,000 tonnes of finished steel a year, including reinforcing bar, angles, squares, rounds, and flats for construction, manufacturing, and infrastructure.

The clever bit is the recipe. Coega Steels has been melting recycled scrap into steel billets since 2014, but until now it had to send those billets elsewhere to be rolled. Now it can do the whole job on one site, from scrap to finished product. Director Amit Saini says it is the only rolling mill in the Eastern Cape, and it means the company can supply the province and the coast directly.

The mill is running production trials on 12 hour shifts, with round the clock production planned in the coming weeks. Local reports put it at about 300 direct jobs.

1 mill will not fix every shortage, and heavier structural sections are a different story. But if you buy rebar or light sections in the Eastern Cape, a supplier down the road instead of up the N2 could help with both lead times and transport costs.

From scrap yard to site, without leaving the province.

Think Cape Town’s bridges took a while? Pisa would like a word.

Work on the Leaning Tower of Pisa started in 1173, on a foundation only about 3 metres deep in soft, wet ground. By 1178, around the 3rd floor, it was already tipping. Then wars between Italian city states kept stopping the work, sometimes for decades. Those long pauses gave the soil time to settle and firm up, which very likely saved the tower from toppling over.

When building resumed, the masons tried to correct the lean by making the upper floors taller on one side. The result is a tower that is slightly curved, like a banana. It was finally finished around 1372, 199 years after the first stone. In 1990 it was closed for 11 years while engineers carefully removed soil from under the high side, letting it settle back by about 40 cm.

The lesson for anyone on site. Respect the ground, check your levels, and sometimes a delay does you a favour.

That’s a wrap on edition 20.

The Build Brief, powered by Supply Sphere Solutions, rounds up the news, tips, and tools that help you build better, and unlike some bridges we know, it always arrives on time.

Know someone in the trade who would enjoy this? Forward it on. Every past edition is waiting on our website, from Roman concrete to Pisa’s banana tower.

👉 www.thebuildbrief.co.za

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