Officials lying about Durban’s beaches

I WAS in Gauteng over the weekend and I saw this headline splashed across the front page of the “Beaches fail poo tests” (November 20). My heart sank. Has my once proud city come to this – a stinking city with raw sewage flowing all over it?

In fact, Durban has been making headline news all over the country – in the newspapers and on television – not for any good reasons, but for all the wrong reasons: its prime attraction – the beaches – polluted with raw sewage.

So important are Durban’s beaches to holidaymakers in Gauteng that the Sunday paper got an accredited independent testing company, Talbot, to test the quality of water at six Durban beaches and found that two of them, Toti Main and Durban Country Club, which were declared safe for bathing by the municipality, were in fact heavily polluted with

Like many residents, I have “seen” it myself. Our rivers have become open sewers and have an awful smell.

In fact, Durban residents have been complaining that the municipality has not been coming clean about the state of the beaches. Just a few days ago, municipal officials were confident when they told the media that all Durban beaches would be open by Wednesday. The municipality is acting irresponsibly by putting the health of the public at risk. This is a serious dereliction of duty and those municipal officials who have been misleading the public should be hauled over the coals.

It is bad news for Durban’s tourism industry. The pandemic, the riots, floods and now the stinking beaches. Durban is indeed building up a reputation as a typical rundown, dirty backwater African city. The hospitality industry will suffer the most.