After growing increasingly fed up with the proliferation of potholes in his street, pensioner Rainer Dixel decided to stop moaning and fix them himself.
The 82-year-old retired mechanical engineer, who is incapable of sitting still and is known by his identical twin granddaughters as “the man who can fix or design anything”, has embarked on a quest to make the roads of Bryanston, Johannesburg, drivable once again.
Dixel, who is Austrian by birth and still speaks with an accent, has lived in his family home since he bought it in 1976 — six years after arriving in South Africa with just $50 after being offered a lucrative job here.
“Things were very different all those years ago,” Dixel said. “Back then there were no potholes and you didn’t need a 4x4 to drive down the street.”
With a fellow Austrian engineer, Dixel launched a business making formwork for the construction industry. He retired 12 years ago, and became a handyman. One of the first tasks he took on was fixing potholes at an Engen garage.
“I am not trained in potholes, but as an engineer you can work things out,” he said. He cleans out the hole, fills it with cold asphalt and compacts it firmly. Vehicles can drive over the repair immediately.
But in recent weeks he has grown increasingly frustrated at the state of the busy street where he lives.
“We travel this street every day and it’s just impossible in a small car. This is a public road but you can’t drive on it,” he said. So it was off to Builders Warehouse, where he bought some bags of cold asphalt for R175 each.
Proud of her dad’s efforts, daughter Candace posted about it on Facebook.
“The king of potholes. My dad committed to improving the state of the nation one pothole at a time! Legend!” she wrote, attracting grateful thanks and messages of support from the local community.
“One man in a beautiful Mercedes stopped while I was busy at one of the holes, said ‘thank you’ and gave me R200,” said Dixel, who has picked up pothole sponsorships from an Austrian friend Andy Leitner.
Leitner, whose father grew up with Dixel in the Austrian village of Türnitz, made contact with him in 1998 during a visit to South Africa, and they stayed in touch.
Leitner is in South Africa at the moment and has been accompanying Dixel on the pothole mission, heading out with a trailer loaded with spades, brooms, a compactor and bags of cold asphalt.
They work together companionably, chatting away in German, occasionally directing cars to pass around them, sometimes receiving thanks and other times expressions of annoyance from impatient drivers who skirt around them.
“Thanks so much. Really. Thank you, thank you. Please can you do my street next,” shouted a grateful woman driving past.
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