Plastic trashes Cape waters
SEWAGE: RIVER, CANAL VROT WITH E. COLI – AND CITY UNDERSPENDS BUDGET BY MILLIONS
For two years running, budget that can be used to clean up waterways not spent.
Some of Cape Town’s rivers and canals are so polluted they are essentially open streams of sewage and although the City of Cape Town is aware of this, the water and waste directorate has vastly underspent its budget for the past two financial years.
Participants in the annual Peninsula Paddle, an event organised by scientists and environmentalists to paddle the interlinked waterways from Muizenberg to Paarden Eiland, were taken aback by the state of the rivers.
The plastic waste was the worst they had seen in 10 years, said Kevin Winter of the University of Cape Town’s Future Water Institute.
The worst-affected waterways were the Steenberg Canal and the Black River, which flows past Observatory, to exit into the ocean at Paarden Eiland.
The Steenberg canal was filled not only with plastic trash, but dead dogs and cats, and electronic goods.
In the Black River, the paddlers were surprised by a floating island of plastic trapped by hyacinth.
Water samples taken in the Black River for E. coli – a microbiological indicator species – revealed colony-forming unit (CFU) counts of over a million per 100ml.
According to national guidelines for intermediate contact with water, such as kayaking, anything over 4 000 CFU per 100ml is unacceptable. Winter said counts of a million are consistent with untreated sewage.
The pollution the paddlers found in the Black River was in spite of a citizen-led mass cleanup of the river in May. “As paddlers, we shouldn’t even have been on the water,” Winter said.
There are an average of 400 sewage spills in the city daily, according to reports tabled in the city’s water and waste portfolio committee meeting on September 5. Unless contained, these drain into waterways.
Yet the water and sanitation department has underspent its capital expenditure budget for the past two financial years.
Reports tabled in the meeting note that only R1.5 billion out of a water and sanitation department capital expenditure budget of R2.3 billion had been spent – just 64.5% of the budget.
In the previous financial year, only 55% was spent.
And spending does not seem to have improved so far this financial year. In July, the first month of the 2019-20 financial year, only R7.1 million of the capital expenditure allocation of R36.6 million had been spent.
Only 10.1km of sewer mains were replaced. The target was 23.6km.
Of the solid waste department’s operating budget – which could be used for cleaning the waterways – just R181 million or 67.5% of the July allotment of R268.2 million had been spent.
Reasons for underspending given by the water and sanitation department included delays in awarding tenders due to lack of responses and appeals against awarded tenders. The city had nor replied to requests for comment by the time of going to print.
Republished from Groundup. org.za