Blasting of Gorilla rock starts Monday-Evacuation plans ready |07 October 2004

Representatives of all emergency services on Tuesday met with residents of the 50 homes considered to be in the danger zone and advised them they will need to vacate their homes during the blasting, expected to last six weeks.

Every day from Monday to Friday, they will be expected to vacate their homes between 8.00 and 9.00 a.m. to allow for the blasting that will be starting at 10.00 a.m.

They will be expected to return to their houses after blasting is halted for the particular day at 2.00 p.m., but only if the master blaster says that the remaining portion of the rock is stable enough.

"Otherwise the residents will be accommodated in hotels or paid an allowance to stay with friends and relatives if they so choose," the Minister for Land Use and Habitat, Joel Morgan, said during the meeting with the residents.

He chaired the meeting which took place at Beau Vallon Community Centre from 5.00 p.m. on Tuesday when he announced the project will cost government R3.8 million.

He said government is negotiating public liability insurance cover in the event of somebody dying in the process, but even if such negotiations are not concluded, government will take the responsibility of paying compensation in the unlikely eventuality of the loss of life.

"We are taking pictures of all the houses in the danger zone and we want each of you to submit a list of all valuable assets in your houses in case they are damaged so that eventual compensation procedures are easier to implement," he said.

He said blasting will take place over six weeks, but not during weekends.

Traffic police said they will block all access to the area and military and other personnel will patrol it to ensure a cordon is maintained and vacated homes are not burgled. There will be a command post for the centralised coordination of necessary services, and senior citizens will be housed and fed at the district community centre during the day.

Minister Morgan said the government has decided to remove the menacing-looking boulder after foreign contractors failed to convince the authorities it can be safely secured.

During the meeting, representatives of Surface Blasters, the South African company that will destroy the rock, illustrated how they accurately dismantled a piece of granitic rock here during a demonstration.

"This will not be done in the conventional method of blasting as we know it," the principal secretary for Habitat and Development Planning, Patrick Lablache, said.

"They will more or less slice the rock as you do with bread, taking out a piece at a time," he said.

The several-hundred tonne feature has a detached rounded piece dubbed "the head" resting on a "body" that juts out majestically off a several hundred-metre, perfectly vertical cliff.

Residents and authorities first got alarmed when a similar feature recently dislodged and tumbled down into a valley below but caused no casualties.