Cape rubbish fight raises stink

Municipality accused of exporting garbage problem

FIRST it was the trucks and the flies. Then came the rotten smell in the wind blasting through the once tranquil town of Gansbaai, home to a massive new rubbish dump overlooking the sea.

But worst of all — it is not Gansbaai’s rubbish. The bulk of the stinking muck and sand rising above the town in a giant heap comes from Hermanus, 50km away.

For 18 months, thousands of tons of municipal waste have been trucked at great expense from the smart holiday town to the coastal dorp better known for poaching and great white sharks.

Now Gansbaai residents have had enough and are accusing the Democratic Alliance-controlled Overstrand municipality of exporting its waste problem rather than resolving it.

“We are sitting with all the rubbish. The heap is just growing and growing and growing,” said Jannie Bothma, chairman of the De Kelders-Perlemoenbaai Ratepayers’ Association.

“I want to know — how did we get into this situation?”

This week, a stench hung over the massive dump site where municipal officials were still mopping up after devastating floods that hit the Western Cape last weekend.

Rubbish trucks travelling between Hermanus and Gansbaai had to make a detour via Caledon — a round trip of nearly 200km — because of a damaged bridge.

The Gansbaai dump is situated on the outskirts of town at the base of a mountain ridge that displays the town’s name in white letters formed with stones.

“One of these days the name Gansbaai will be covered up by the dump. You will just see the top of the letters,” said Bothma.

Waste from a large town is being dumped in a small one. It’s not right

Granted, the authorities responded to complaints by dumping vast amounts of sand on top of the rubbish and also by opening a massive new dump “pit”.

But the large number of trucks passing the Masakhane township are a problem too.

“People have been complaining about this — they are messing up the road,” said Masakhane ANC ward councillor Nomaxeside Nqinata. “The papers in the trucks are blowing out.”

But Overstrand said the rubbish fiasco was not its fault. It said it stemmed from the closure of the region’s Karwyderskraal waste disposal facility outside Hermanus, which was run by the Overberg district municipality, which is also DA-controlled.

Overstrand’s deputy mayor, Pieter Scholtz, said Overberg had been unable to secure the loan needed to keep the facility running, which had forced Overstrand to make an alternative plan at short notice. “They only let us know at the end of October that they couldn’t get a loan for the expansion of the facility,” Scholtz said.

The Overstrand council was considering taking over the entire facility and in the meantime had allocated R8-million towards the Gansbaai project, he said. But Overstrand’s actions were a case of too little too late, said Hermanus Business Chamber member Bobby von During.

Overstrand’s municipal manager, Coenie Groenewald, could not be reached to confirm the volume of rubbish entering Gansbaai, but the Karwyderskraal facility was handling about 4 500 tons a month before it closed. The acting municipal manager of the Overberg district municipality, David Beretti, said his officials were working hard to resolve the waste problem.