Jeffrey Barbee

Jeffrey Barbee covers South Africa as a photojournalist for GlobalPost. Barbee has worked in Africa since 1996, and his photographic work on AIDS, education and environmental topics appears...

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Jeffrey Barbee's Notebook:

February 3, 2009 17:29 ET

South Africa's Gautrain is digging under Johannesburg

Flying from Malawi into Johannesburg is a shock. It’s a short flight from the green rolling hills and villages of that little African country into one of the world's growing megacities, with emphasis on the mega. Miles and miles of townships surrounded by old gold mines and their sprawling tailings dumps are punctuated by smaller groups of sparkling blue swimming pools and green lawns.

Johannesburg is a city that has grown beyond belief, stretching more than 75 miles across, and made up of scores of disparate suburbs. The city stretches from Soweto in the south across Johannesburg all the way to Pretoria in the north. The main form of transportation are the highways which are clogged with traffic jams of cars, trucks and the taxi vans that carry township residents to and from work.

To address this problem the government is building the Gautrain — a composite name that comes from Gauteng Province, which encompasses Johannesburg and Pretoria. The train system runs underground for long stretches in Johannesburg and those parts are currently being dug by a huge earth-tunnelling vehicle, like the one that dug the channel tunnel from England to France. The vibrations of its huge radial blades are slightly shaking my computer screen right now. When the rock is too hard, as the bedrock here is sometimes, the engineers blast through it with explosives.

The train was initially proposed to be used for the World Cup soccer tournament in 2010 but officials have acknowledged that the system will only be up and running by 2011 at the soonest.

Soweto, the most populous part of the Johannesburg megacity has been left out of the system. Its millions will still have to commute in the dangerous minibus taxis that people call "road coffins" for the many fatal accidents that they are in. 

The digging has also caused some serious problems. Six months ago a section of one Johannesburg's main roads collapsed because the ground beneath it had been weakened by the digging of the Gautrain tunnel. Mid-day traffic came to a halt and by a miracle and the assistance of people on the road, no one was hurt.

The Gautrain runs directly under my apartment, not just under my building —my apartment is over the center of the tunnel, 68 feet below the ground. I had a perfect view of the collapsed roadway from my balcony, and the next 1000 feet of tunnelling is going on right now.

Last night the building shook to the tremor of explosions. It’s a very large heavy building, and only the next few days will tell if I still have a flat or another hole in the ground like the mine dumps that litter this sprawling city.