Flooded by sewage and water
Smell, damp in her home is unbearable
A67-YEAR-OLD Ilitha woman is fed up at having to live with the damp conditions caused by a leaky neighbourhood tap.
Mandisa Mafu told the Saturday Dispatch that she had just won a court battle over a sewage problem with one of her neighbours last year, when this problem arose.
“I live a horrible life in my own house. I had to take my other neighbour to court over their sewage spills which were flowing into my house. It took us three years to sort that out,” Mafu said.
In October last year, Mafu noticed water flowing from neighbour Blacky Vena’s property into her yard and, at times, her house.
She claims Vena’s water tap broke and he used the outside stop valve to turn the water on and off in his house.
When the valve is open, water pours out of a tap outside the neighbour’s house, as well as to the taps in his house.
“The water flowing from the outside tap comes through my whole yard. Sometimes he just leaves the stop valve open and the water comes into my house,” she said.
“The whole place gets damp. That is how it is almost every morning. What they are doing to me is unfair,” she said, adding that the dampness had caused a bad smell in the house too.
Vena said he did not have the money to fix the tap. “I will fix it at month-end. We use the stop valve because our tap was broken by cows and we do not have money to fence our yard to prevent it from happening again.”
Mafu said her councillor, Gideon Norexe, had failed to assist in the matter.
“I reported the previous issue to our councillor and when I reported this one, he promised to write to the neighbour and visit the home but that never happened.”
In response, Norexe said there was little the municipality could do when residents had broken taps inside their properties. “They know the municipality does not fix residents’ problems that are inside their yards, but we do have situations where we assist people, especially indigents, even though it’s against our policy. If she has a problem, she must come to us and we will see how we can sort the issue out,” Norexe said.