Traffic official beats a weighty problem

HOW DO you weigh a truck and its contents on a weighbridge with a capacity of
40 000 kilograms when its eventual overload was found to be 62 tons?
This is the problem which confronted provincial traffic chief Koos Mellet and his staff when a heavily overloaded truck was stopped on the N12 near Kimberley.
The total weight of the vehicle and its freight amounted to 118 tons when the weighing was completed. How was the figure reached?
Mellet's men had the cargo painstakingly off-loaded onto several smaller trucks which were lined up for the operation, and weighed, as he puts it, in sections.
What this overload does to our tarred roads doesn't bear thinking about, says Mellet.