Stinky Vaal is a river too dirty to SANDF
● Almost a year of work by 200 army engineers has left the heavily polluted Vaal River worse off than before, according to environmental activists.
Now the department of water & sanitation (DWS) has brought in a specialist company to fix broken sewage systems that pump up to 130-million litres of raw effluent a day into the waterway.
Last year, the department said the system should take a year to fix. Ten months later, a war of words has broken out between the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and the DWS over who is to blame for the failure to make progress.
Emfuleni local council’s waste-water system comprises more than 1,000km of pipelines that move waste water and sewage through 44 pump stations and into three waste-water treatment works: Sebokeng, Rietspruit and Leeukuil.
The sewage should be treated before being released into the river, but 39 broken pump stations and broken pipes mean raw or only partly treated sewage flows into the Vaal, poisoning the water.
DWS spokesperson Sputnik Ratau said: “The work that the SANDF has done so far has not yet got all the pumps going. We have called in Erwat [a bulk waste-water management company] because they are specialists. Getting the pumps up to speed is going to take time and it will be done in increments. It’s difficult to predict how long it will take.”
When Deputy President David Mabuza visited the Sebokeng sewage plant two weeks ago, he expressed shock at how long the Vaal River system was taking to fix.
The weekly Rand Water sampling on Friday measured E coli bacteria in the water just downstream from Sebokeng and found more than 2.4-million organisms per 100ml. A count of more than 400 is regarded as hazardous to human health. E coli is a sewage-borne bacterium that can be lethal to small children and the elderly.
Maureen Stewart, of environmental group Save the Vaal, said the river was “worse than when the army arrived”.
SANDF spokesperson Siphiwe Dlamini said budget constraints meant the soldiers were unable to continue their work.
“This project is not a defence force project but we were called in to assist,” he said, adding that so far soldiers had fixed two primary treatment tanks.
Ruan Oosthuizen, AfriForum’s Vanderbijlpark environmental and local government co-ordinator, said: “We’ve seen areas with dead fish, local birds are leaving, cattle and livestock are getting sick.”