Tragic consequences of Cape Town water crisis
● “Now this was Tylin’s favourite. His grandfather bought it and it plays nursery rhymes,” says Rose Janneke as she opens a box of toys. She presses a button on a red car over and over but it remains silent. Her daughter, Christin, Tylin’s mother, chokes with emotion and stares into the distance.
“Maybe it needs batteries,” says Rose, hiding the toy under a table.
It has been almost exactly a week since her one-year-old grandson drowned in a bucket of water left beside the toilet for use in the cistern.
“We have no one but ourselves to blame,” said Rose. Like millions of other Capetonians, the family from Scottsdene has been saving water for months. Last year, the city council installed a device that cuts supply to the family of 15 once daily consumption reaches 350 litres.
They recycle every drop and store it in buckets. On Tuesday March 6, the family was watching 7de Laan when the toddler wandered through the house because someone had forgotten to lock the gate leading to the toilet.
Rose believes Day Zero warnings — now withdrawn for this year — caused panic. “It was not right to scare us the way they did. Surely they had to plan, they are the ones who have to supply water to us.”
Tylin’s is the second known drowning of a child in a container of recycled water since the implementation of water restrictions. In December, 20-month-old Connor Weber from Rondebosch drowned in a bin filled with rainwater.
Christin, now 18, fell pregnant with Tylin when she was in high school. Despite this she returned to the classroom and matriculated last year, then started working at a pharmacy in Brackenfell. On her second day at work she received the dreaded call.
“She hasn’t really spoken ever since. I am worried about her,” said Rose, who planned Tylin’s funeral, which was held yesterday.
His great-grandmother, Christina Plaatjies, has even given up her fight with the city council over a R5 000 bill for installation of the water management device.
“I’m not going to bother any more. I will pay R200 extra every month until they say I’m done,” said Plaatjies, who had just found the toddler’s bottle in a paper cup under a couch. Putting it there was, they believe, probably the last thing he did before he drowned.
Dr Colleen Saunders, research manager at the University of Cape Town emergency medicine division and convener of the scientific advisory committee at Lifesaving South Africa, said caregivers of young children had to be vigilant.
“While we all need to do our best to save water during this crisis, we must be aware of the added drowning risk that stored water can pose,” she said.
“Even before the current water crisis, young children have been particularly susceptible to drowning in and around the home.”
Kraaifontein resident Wendey Jacobs’s 20-monthold daughter, Lunique, almost died in January after her mother’s domestic worker left a bucket of water in the kitchen.
“I was in the lounge and heard a soft sound. Lunique had fallen into the water and I saw her feet kicking. When I picked her up I screamed: ‘Jesus, Jesus, please help me.’
“Her eyes were huge,” said Jacobs.
A paediatrician has given the toddler a clean bill of health, but Jacobs said: “I need people to know they have to be very careful as children at this age are very curious. I don’t blame the lady but she still blames herself.”
Connor’s uncle, Pierre Weber, said his brother Daniel stored recycled water only in buckets with lids. But on December 4, Daniel moved a bin to a different location, and Connor fell in.
Pierre believed the boy’s parents would never get over the tragedy. “The silence in the house is deafening,” he said. “They are both shattered . . . It is so traumatic to lose a child.”
While we all need to do our best to save water, we must be aware of the added drowning risk that stored water can pose. Young children have been particularly susceptible to drowning in the home
Colleen Saunders Research manager at the University of Cape Town emergency medicine division