Are They Mad?

Ambulances must pay tolls on Chapman’s Peak? Really?  Is that because they’ve installed an e-toll fancy fence at Chapman’s Peak?  Or is it just that the municipality of Cape Town is nuts.

Let me make this very clear.  Ambulances which are rushing to hospitals on emergency missions, sirens blaring, lights flashing, with a person in need of emergency medical attention in the back must stop, with their critically ill human cargo, and scratch around for coins to pay a toll because, naturally, the paying of the R40 or so toll on Chapman’s Peak must take total precedence over the preservation of human life.

Though it definitely doesn’t inspire gaffaws of hilarity, it might at least inspire  tepid amusement that someone from the ambulance company should call the municipality for help and get an ‘out of the office till mid January’ response.    Really?  No national disasters or emergencies will be addressed until mid January?  Isn’t there even an emergency number?  No there is not.  The whole country, and the peoples of other countries, descend on your city  in enormous numbers for the annual holidays; holidays, I might add, which often result in the need for ambulances, and other emergency vehicles way beyond Chapman’s Peak, and at the municipal government offices not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse; not even an emergency number.

Imagine you are in that ambulance because you’ve injured yourself quite severely.  I mean we have cars.  We can drive.  So if someone has gone to the extent of calling an ambulance everyone must know that it’s serious.  Imagine that there is a queue at Chapmans Peak tollgate, because it is an incredibly beautiful route and lots of people drive around it and no one is in a hurry going around it.

Imagine that the ambulance driver having picked up your critically injured, barely alive, fighting for it’s existence body finds that he doesn’t have the change needed to pass the toll gate.  What will happen?  Will you sit on the side and die because of a lack of R40 and a tollgate operator without the sense that he was born with?  Will the ‘emergency’ that precipitated the need for an ambulance be ignored because of the lack of R40?

If there’s an accident on the Chapman’s Peak route would the company that administers the toll rather let the people in the accident sit and suffer in their wrecked vehicles because the toll people need to collect R40?  Would there be a line of ambulances sitting at the toll unable to get to the injured because it is so all important that the ‘toll must be paid’.  It’s ridiculous!

Well, I think they should shut down that toll.  It’s a hazard to human safety.  All evidence suggests that a foreign company owns the Chapman’s Peak toll.  Is that possible?  It would make sense.  Only a foreign company, one would hope, could have such a stupid, avaricious, alarmingly callous approach to the well being of South African citizens and their guests.

Entilini Concession, they are called.  It sounds foreign, doesn’t it.  The Director with the incomprehensibly idiotic attitude is called Rob Pomario.  That also sounds foreign.  But  look, this is South Africa so they could just be degenerate descendants of Europeans who ran away from their homelands in the 50’s and 60’s because they loved the idea of a society where by oppressing and enslaving the indigenous populations they were able to live like kings.  Perhaps they are the degenerate descendants of those kinds of corrupt mercenary members of the human race and are resolutely carrying the dirty little baton into the next millennium.

Perhaps it’s in their blood to ignore the need to make the passing of an ambulance carrying a critically ill or injured person an absolute priority.  Is there another explanation?

The only other explanation is that they are mad.