The City of Cape Town is replacing metal, cast-iron manhole covers, with plastic and ductile-iron covers – potentially saving the ratepayer millions of rands each year.

Manholes in new developments across the city are now fitted with hinged ductile-iron covers and frames.

Maintenance teams from the City’s Water and Sanitation Department are also replacing the stolen or missing cast-iron manhole covers in the established suburbs with the new generation polymer (synthetic) plastic covers if the manhole is
in the verge.

“The latest statistics for metal theft across the city confirm that the cast-iron manhole covers are the most sought-after item for metal thieves, with 3 606 of these covers stolen across the city in 2014. This is an increase of over 21% if compared with 2013, when 2 979 manhole covers were stolen.

We have to take action to curb these losses and have therefore opted for covers that have no monetary value for the thieves,” says the City’s Mayoral Committee Member for Utility Services, Councillor Ernest Sonnenberg.

The actual cost to the City due to the theft of fire hydrant covers, meter covers and meters, manhole covers, and valves, amounted to nearly R13.5 million in 2014.

“In fact, the cumulative cost to the City due to metal theft is R40.3 million since January 2012 to the end of last year. In this period we had to replace nearly 18 000 individual assets across the city,’ says Sonnenberg.

The older manhole covers are made of cast-iron. Metal thieves steal these covers, break them up with hammers, and sell the material off as scrap metal. The polymer plastic covers, however, have no scrap metal value and the ductile-iron covers have very little. It therefore makes sense to replace the older cast-iron manhole covers with these.

The cost to fit a polymer plastic cover is R500 each and that of a ductile-iron cover up to
R7 500, inclusive of the labour.

It is significantly more expensive to fit the latter as the ductile-iron cover fits into its own frame with a hinge and therefore the maintenance teams first have to remove the existing frames for the old iron manhole covers before they can fit the ductile-iron manhole covers to the manhole.