The National Prosecuting Authority is considering taking action against the Stellenbosch Municipality for polluting the Eerste River.
|||Cape Town - The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) is considering taking action against Stellenbosch Municipality for polluting the Eerste River, which a leading water expert says has contributed to cases of diarrhoea.
Eric Ntabazalila, spokes-man for the NPA, said it would decide early next week if and how the matter would be taken further.
The case was referred to the NPA by the Department of Water Affairs (DWA).
Linda Page, spokeswoman for the DWA, said the municipality was facing possible criminal charges for contravening the National Water Act 36 of 1998 for polluting the river.
The river’s headwaters are in the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve.
It flows through the town of Stellenbosch to Macassar, where it enters the sea.
Page said the department “was forced to resort to prosecution” after it became apparent that sewage polluting the river was “not receiving the necessary attention from the municipality”.
She said the department had received “numerous complaints”, starting in 1993, from farmers and community members about the river’s poor water quality.
“This is a situation that has been coming for a decade or more,” said water expert Jo Barnes.
“The sewage works are far too small.”
Barnes said the river was polluted by two sources. The first was Stellenbosch’s overloaded sewage plant. Spill over from the plant runs into the river.
The second was the Plankenburg River, a tributary of the Eerste River, which flows through the area of Kayamandi.
The river becomes polluted with untreated sewage as it flows though Kayamandi, which lacks adequate toilet facilities.
Barnes, a senior lecturer in communicable health at Stellenbosch University’s faculty of medicine , said both sources of pollution needed to be fixed to ensure the river was clean.
Currently, the river’s pollution contributed to cases of diarrhoea, she said.
The river’s poor water quality can also be hazardous to farmers who use it for irrigation.
Barnes, who has been red- flagging problems at Stellenbosch’s sewage plant since 1998, said the situation had clearly overtaken the municipality’s ability to act.
Underfunding of sewage systems, a constantly changing municipality and a growing population had caused the town’s sewage works to become overloaded, she said.
According to councillor Dawid Botha, the sewage plant’s capacity is 20 megalitres a day, but higher capacity was needed.
But he said the municipality had a plan to pump R180 million into upgrading the plant’s capacity to 35 megalitres, over a period of three years.
Botha said the municipality first had to fix, at a cost of R73m, the Wemmershoek sewage plant which was in an even worse state than Stellenbosch’s plant.
He added that the Stellenbosch sewage plant had recently been upgraded, but this improved water quality, not capacity.
jan.cronje@inl.co.za
Cape Times