Investing in Road Safety

MAXIMISING RIMS IN NORTHEN CAPE

The Northern Cape is the largest of our nine provinces, comprising 30.5% of South Africa’s land area, with 3 257km of national roads, 4 989km of provincial surfaced roads and 22 746km of provincial gravel roads. It is bordered by the Free State, North West, Eastern Cape and Western Cape – and by Botswana and Namibia. While the Northern Cape has significantly fewer fatalities than other provinces, road safety remains a core priority. There are still a significant number of incidents. Over the past three years, the province recorded more than 26 000 incidents, of which around 800 were fatal. There are six Centralised Communication Centres (CCCs) that operate 24 hours a day and their role is to dispatch all relevant services required at an incident scene. When one occurs, a set of coordinated activities is initiated via the CCCs to minimise the primary and secondary effects of the incident, as well as to restore normal road capacity and safety to all affected road facilities as soon as possible. In line with SANRAL’s vision to contribute to safer roads, the Road Incident Management System (RIMS) was implemented to achieve an efficient use of resources in a coordinated and pre-planned manner in order to manage incident scenes effectively. This system involves:

• Establishing a Governance Structure for RIMS
• Developing an area-specific emergency guideline plan for operations
• Efficient detection and the coordinated response of emergency services to major incidents
• Promoting on-scene safety and better cooperation among role players

A traffic incident may warrant a response from emergency services such as ambulance, police, fire and traffic – particularly when lives are at risk. Non-emergency services, which include SANRAL, towing services, spill clean-up teams and specialist services, will focus on minimising the impact on and inconvenience to other road users by cleaning up and restoring the site to normal conditions as quickly as possible. The distances between towns in the Northern Cape are vast. Should an incident such as a truck losing its load occur and cause that road to be closed to traffic, commuters, businesses and other services are affected for long periods.

While such an incident may not be lifethreatening, a delayed response time from emergency services, as well as the clean-up and road rehabilitation exercise, can have dire consequences for the treatment of patients and the local economy. The RIMS strategy makes provision for various levels of stakeholder engagement meetings that bring all emergency services together to resolve challenges caused by long road closures. Training, simulations and post-incident assessments are frequently done to improve the system and ensure fast detection and response. SANRAL remains steadfast in its commitment not only to design, finance, improve, manage and maintain the national road network as the country’s economic arteries, but also constantly to invest in technology and tools that improve the experience of road users, with incidents causing as little disruption as possible.