Hyacinth at dam traced to open boom gate
AN OPEN boom gate has been one of the main causes behind the spread of the water hyacinth at Inanda Dam in Msinsi Resort. This was raised during a special meeting that was held about this dam yesterday. The meeting was convened by the managing director of Msinsi Holdings, Mbali Ndlovu.
Local users of this dam and stakeholders expressed their dissatisfaction with the resort, Umgeni Water and the Department of Fishery, Forestry and the Environment, saying that installing the boom gate was the easiest thing to do and it could have prevented the water hyacinth from spreading across the dam.
The dam provides thousands of Durbanites with water. Moreover, the hyacinth reduces water quality, consumes a lot of water, poses a threat to biodiversity and could be harmful to other aquatic species.
John Easton said the opening of the boom gate was part of the problem. He said that in the past when the gate was closed the hyacinth would be prevented from entering the dam, and was easier to deal with.
Easton expressed how frustrating it was for him and other users to take their boats to the dam as it was hard to move around because of the hyacinth. He said it was wrong to close the gates months after the Dusi marathon had taken place.
One of his suggestions was that
a helicopter be brought in to spray a chemical around the dam to kill the water hyacinth. However, he acknowledged that when this was done in the past some farmers claimed that their crops had died due to the chemicals.
“What I suggest is once we have identified areas where the hyacinth sits, talk to the farmers around that area, get a drone up there and do a normalised difference vegetation index (ndvi) and it will tell you exactly the quality of that farm, and if they come back later to say their crops are dying, we can show that it is not because of the chemical sprayed in the dam,” said Easton.
Brad Glasspoole of the Dusi Canoe Marathon said the decisions to be taken would affect he community members, so they needed to be considered. He further stated that they had never asked for the boom gate to be removed.
After a discussion, everyone agreed that a boom gate would be a good solution. The stakeholders demanded that they be given a time frame as to when it will be installed, and pleaded with Umgeni Water and the resort to effectively communicate what was happening.
A solution after the engagement by KZN regional manager Ryan Brudvig from the Department of Fishery, Forestry and the Environment: Natural Resource Management (DFFE-NRM) was that there would be teams to permanently do the chemical spraying, and to install the boom gate as soon as possible and to install a PVC pipe.
Umgeni Speaker Sanele Vilakazi said the hyacinth was invasive and that the installation of the boom gate would be a priority. He added that weeds reproduce faster than the agents could control them. As such, until the issue of eutrophication has been addressed, an integrated approach combining the use of bio-control, chemicals and manual removal was the only viable solution.