Stream that started pure steadily made toxic

THERE were bits of bark and soil floating in it; it looked like a wild cup of rooibos as it ran over the rocks, but we drank it anyway.

Up high in the Boland Mountains in the Western Cape, right at the source of the Berg River: the water didn’t come from a tap and it hadn’t been treated.

This would be the only time those participating in the WWF’s Journey of Water – where walkers hiked 85km over four days last week to trace water from its source to the ocean – would be able to even touch untreated river water safely.

The water in this area is kept flowing by two decades of effort to clear 1 800 hectares of alien vegetation from the catchment. Even despite this, 10 percent of the stream flow in the catchment is still lost to alien vegetation.

The water at the source of the Berg River had an count of just 14 per 100ml. Once the walkers, and the water, reached Stellenbosch on day two, it had an count of 34 million per 100ml. That’s over 8 000 times the safe drinking limit for water.

Then the water entered the machine. It is pumped into a water treatment plant, where it’s decoloured and chlorinated, and sent off in pipes to come out of taps. But further downstream, the results of this clear water are returning again to the river.

At the Zandvliet Waste Water Treatment Plant, sewage comes back through the pipes. People are even polluting the sewage: 90 percent of the solids shouldn’t be there. Car parts, bricks, tampons. The waste works treat it with bacteria before it’s released into the Kuils River and washes into Khayelitsha.

The same fynbos-coloured water now surrounded by plastic packets and waste, just walking distance from where it started.