The long and deadly ride home

Traffic was backed up at toll gates on all the national highways yesterday afternoon as motorists headed home after the holidays.

At 4.30pm yesterday, 1924 cars were moving through the Middelburg toll plaza on the N4 in Mpumalanga.

The northbound toll gates on the N1, at the Tugela toll plaza, in KwaZulu-Natal, were recording about 1980 cars an hour passing through.

The high traffic volumes worried AA spokesman Marius Luyt, who said: "When comparing this year to previous years, the figure of 1143 fatalities released on December 24 is high."

He said that traffic volumes might be staggered this year by the dramatic petrol price decrease. Petrol could drop by as much as R1.27/l on Wednesday.

He said: "When you consider that this could save motorists as much as R170 on a trip from Cape Town to Johannesburg, people might decide to stay away longer."

ER24 spokesman Werner Vermaak said a car rolled on the N1, near Bloemfontein, in the Free State yesterday morning. A six-year-old girl was airlifted to Bloemfontein after she lost a leg. Her parents suffered less serious injuries.

In Margate, Arrive Alive reported that an eight-year-old girl sustained serious injuries when she fell from a 3m wall at holiday flats in Margate, in KwaZulu-Natal, on Saturday night.

In Cape Town tragedy was averted when a woman rescued a three-month-old baby. Pierrene Strimling was at a red traffic light when she noticed something unusual.

"I was at the corner of Belvedere and Lansdowne roads when I saw a woman who looked like she was shouting at me.

"But it was at a man on the opposite side of the road. I turned my car around to see what was happening.

"There was a mother passed out drunk on the other side of the road and her baby was rolling around," Strimling said.

She took the baby to the Claremont police station, which contacted social services.

The employer of the woman was found and the baby girl, who was unharmed, was handed over to him by social services workers.