Any local politician would prefer to be remembered for "building" a thousand new houses, rather than for passing a budget setting aside more money for the local sewerage network. But it is exactly this innocent twist of human nature that is helping to shape a sewerage crisis, which is now hitting the country.
Since 2004 a spate of surveys and technical papers have noted that up to 70 percent of municipal waste-treatment works face collapse for lack of proper maintenance and extension, while around a third require "immediate intervention" and another third intervention "within the short to medium term".
Collapse may be the wrong word, but what is happening is ongoing decay as municipalities increasingly fail to comply with the specifications of the licence that allows them to release "treated wastewater" into our rivers, with serious consequences for human health and water ecosystems.
Signs of this decay among the nearly 1,000 wastewater treatment works nationally are becoming ominously visible, in sewerage works in Gauteng, beaches outside Durban and Western Cape facilities.
Last week, while denying that South Africa faced an overall water crisis, water (DWAF) minister Lindiwe Hendricks told Parliament that a DWAF audit of municipal wastewater treatment works "found that the situation in many municipalities is dire, and must be addressed as a matter of urgency".
"The pollution in some of our rivers can be directly linked to failure on the part of these municipal wastewater treatment plants, and there is no denying that some of these plants are in poor condition."
The crisis is not confined to small towns.
The Percy Stewart works in Mogale City (Krugersdorp) feature in a Democratic Alliance report detailing overall infrastructure maintenance problems. The nearby Flip Human works have also run into difficulties.
A 2007/8 DWAF study of the drinking-water quality of 28 Western Cape municipalities found poor water quality (a lower than 97 percent compliance with E coli or faecal standards) in 13 Western Cape municipalities, including Stellenbosch and Oudtshoorn.
In Durban, a sewage leak into the Umhlatuzana River was the main cause of the fish killed in Durban Harbour in late December.
All three of the sewage works in Emfuleni are, if not in crisis, at least under strain. North West University water researcher Professor Johan Tempelhoff has observed raw sewage from the Leeuwkuilspruit works in Sharpeville reaching the Vaal untreated, and raw sewage spilling from the Sebokeng works into water used by Sebokeng residents for washing clothes, for their kids to play in, and as drinking water for animals.
In August last year, on Women's Day, raw sewage from the Rietspruit works lined the road between Vanderbijlpark and Potchefstroom for a distance of two kilometres.
DWAF has intervened in Emfuleni where a residents' organisation, Save the Vaal Environment (Save), is threatening to take the municipality to court. Emfuleni will now spend R50-million on emergency measures while DWAF has undertaken to build a new, regional sewage works at a cost of between R500- and R800-million, and has upgraded sewage pump stations along the river.
The many reports on sanitation agree on what the solutions have to be: regaining skills to operate wastewater treatment plants, and budgeting for proper operations and regular maintenance. Many people responsible for water and wastewater management are inadequately experienced, and lack the skills required for effective and compliant works operation.
They often lack the clout to convince the politicians that limited municipal budgets must give greater priority to funding for staffing, maintenance, repairs, rehabilitation and expansion. Works are frequently under-staffed, with a single operator working during office hours on plants running 24/7.
Because of the complexity of wastewater treatment, many plants have been automated. However, there is a national shortage of instrumentation technicians, who are paid far better in the private sector. This leaves municipal plants at particular risk of failure.
Municipal water services personnel are operating under extreme stress. Often the easiest solution is to defer decisions, including maintenance. There is high staff turnover, and institutional memory and routines are lost. A new study by Allyson Lawless, published by the SA Institution of Civil Engineering, demonstrates that today municipalities employ only a seventh of the number of engineers employed 15 years ago, while service coverage has increased significantly.
Shockingly, 94 municipalities currently employ no engineering staff at all. Training institutions remark that workers who come to them for "advanced training" are often not equipped with the basics. Managers take on positions that require technical training, knowledge and experience, often without having any of these.
Municipal budgets focus on new construction, and not on the unglamourous task of maintenance. The emphasis in government is on building new housing and extending services to the unserved. All this increases the burden on the existing network and treatment works, some of which do not even have the water supply needed to do their job.
Because pipe and storm-water systems are badly maintained, storm water and contaminated rainwater also enter the system, overloading the treatment works.
Similarly, the government is also putting in flush toilets wherever it can. Flush toilets and sewered systems depend on the idea that water carries the waste to where it can be treated and disposed of safely. But when this assumption no longer holds, our sanitation system ends up deliberately polluting fresh water.
The flush idea comes from water-rich Europe, whereas South Africa is an arid country with many poor people. The idea of toilet-flushing, at say 12 litres per flush, is hardly feasible within the current allocation of 6 000 litres of free basic water per household per month.
The irony is that the huge investment in extending coverage in taps and toilets may well lead to rising diarrhoea incidences if we cannot ensure the quality of our effluent treatment and our drinking water treatment. The results are a pollution nightmare.
Our current sanitation system of "flush and forget" is a dangerous one - made more dangerous by the way it is not working. The first mistake is to mix urine and faeces, which makes for a much more active chemistry than they would separately, and then to drop that into clean water.
This mixture then goes through a network of sewer pipes, some of them really old and cracked, with tree roots growing into them creating hooks for plastic bags and condoms.
Assuming it gets to the treatment works, it is then treated by a person who may well not have mastered the basics of his or her job.
To add another layer to the crisis, power interruptions mean that sewage treatment is interrupted too. When the pumps and aerators are out, delicate chemical and biological treatment processes are disrupted, and minimal treatment is possible. The result is that inadequately treated effluent is discharged.
The water, when released from the water treatment plant, may or may not meet the stipulated effluent specifications. However, it still contains nutrients like phosphate which leads to eutrophication - an excess of nutrients in the water resulting in algal blooms - which can turn toxic and disturbs ecosystems.
Even though most of the works treating effluent that is discharged into the Hartebeespoort dam do comply with the conditions of their discharge permits, it is the sheer volume of the nutrient load coming through that is impacting on water quality.
Munnik is an independent environmental researcher working in Johannesburg. - Cape Times
Since 2004 a spate of surveys and technical papers have noted that up to 70 percent of municipal waste-treatment works face collapse for lack of proper maintenance and extension, while around a third require "immediate intervention" and another third intervention "within the short to medium term".
Collapse may be the wrong word, but what is happening is ongoing decay as municipalities increasingly fail to comply with the specifications of the licence that allows them to release "treated wastewater" into our rivers, with serious consequences for human health and water ecosystems.
Signs of this decay among the nearly 1,000 wastewater treatment works nationally are becoming ominously visible, in sewerage works in Gauteng, beaches outside Durban and Western Cape facilities.
Last week, while denying that South Africa faced an overall water crisis, water (DWAF) minister Lindiwe Hendricks told Parliament that a DWAF audit of municipal wastewater treatment works "found that the situation in many municipalities is dire, and must be addressed as a matter of urgency".
"The pollution in some of our rivers can be directly linked to failure on the part of these municipal wastewater treatment plants, and there is no denying that some of these plants are in poor condition."
The crisis is not confined to small towns.
The Percy Stewart works in Mogale City (Krugersdorp) feature in a Democratic Alliance report detailing overall infrastructure maintenance problems. The nearby Flip Human works have also run into difficulties.
A 2007/8 DWAF study of the drinking-water quality of 28 Western Cape municipalities found poor water quality (a lower than 97 percent compliance with E coli or faecal standards) in 13 Western Cape municipalities, including Stellenbosch and Oudtshoorn.
In Durban, a sewage leak into the Umhlatuzana River was the main cause of the fish killed in Durban Harbour in late December.
All three of the sewage works in Emfuleni are, if not in crisis, at least under strain. North West University water researcher Professor Johan Tempelhoff has observed raw sewage from the Leeuwkuilspruit works in Sharpeville reaching the Vaal untreated, and raw sewage spilling from the Sebokeng works into water used by Sebokeng residents for washing clothes, for their kids to play in, and as drinking water for animals.
In August last year, on Women's Day, raw sewage from the Rietspruit works lined the road between Vanderbijlpark and Potchefstroom for a distance of two kilometres.
DWAF has intervened in Emfuleni where a residents' organisation, Save the Vaal Environment (Save), is threatening to take the municipality to court. Emfuleni will now spend R50-million on emergency measures while DWAF has undertaken to build a new, regional sewage works at a cost of between R500- and R800-million, and has upgraded sewage pump stations along the river.
The many reports on sanitation agree on what the solutions have to be: regaining skills to operate wastewater treatment plants, and budgeting for proper operations and regular maintenance. Many people responsible for water and wastewater management are inadequately experienced, and lack the skills required for effective and compliant works operation.
They often lack the clout to convince the politicians that limited municipal budgets must give greater priority to funding for staffing, maintenance, repairs, rehabilitation and expansion. Works are frequently under-staffed, with a single operator working during office hours on plants running 24/7.
Because of the complexity of wastewater treatment, many plants have been automated. However, there is a national shortage of instrumentation technicians, who are paid far better in the private sector. This leaves municipal plants at particular risk of failure.
Municipal water services personnel are operating under extreme stress. Often the easiest solution is to defer decisions, including maintenance. There is high staff turnover, and institutional memory and routines are lost. A new study by Allyson Lawless, published by the SA Institution of Civil Engineering, demonstrates that today municipalities employ only a seventh of the number of engineers employed 15 years ago, while service coverage has increased significantly.
Shockingly, 94 municipalities currently employ no engineering staff at all. Training institutions remark that workers who come to them for "advanced training" are often not equipped with the basics. Managers take on positions that require technical training, knowledge and experience, often without having any of these.
Municipal budgets focus on new construction, and not on the unglamourous task of maintenance. The emphasis in government is on building new housing and extending services to the unserved. All this increases the burden on the existing network and treatment works, some of which do not even have the water supply needed to do their job.
Because pipe and storm-water systems are badly maintained, storm water and contaminated rainwater also enter the system, overloading the treatment works.
Similarly, the government is also putting in flush toilets wherever it can. Flush toilets and sewered systems depend on the idea that water carries the waste to where it can be treated and disposed of safely. But when this assumption no longer holds, our sanitation system ends up deliberately polluting fresh water.
The flush idea comes from water-rich Europe, whereas South Africa is an arid country with many poor people. The idea of toilet-flushing, at say 12 litres per flush, is hardly feasible within the current allocation of 6 000 litres of free basic water per household per month.
The irony is that the huge investment in extending coverage in taps and toilets may well lead to rising diarrhoea incidences if we cannot ensure the quality of our effluent treatment and our drinking water treatment. The results are a pollution nightmare.
Our current sanitation system of "flush and forget" is a dangerous one - made more dangerous by the way it is not working. The first mistake is to mix urine and faeces, which makes for a much more active chemistry than they would separately, and then to drop that into clean water.
This mixture then goes through a network of sewer pipes, some of them really old and cracked, with tree roots growing into them creating hooks for plastic bags and condoms.
Assuming it gets to the treatment works, it is then treated by a person who may well not have mastered the basics of his or her job.
To add another layer to the crisis, power interruptions mean that sewage treatment is interrupted too. When the pumps and aerators are out, delicate chemical and biological treatment processes are disrupted, and minimal treatment is possible. The result is that inadequately treated effluent is discharged.
The water, when released from the water treatment plant, may or may not meet the stipulated effluent specifications. However, it still contains nutrients like phosphate which leads to eutrophication - an excess of nutrients in the water resulting in algal blooms - which can turn toxic and disturbs ecosystems.
Even though most of the works treating effluent that is discharged into the Hartebeespoort dam do comply with the conditions of their discharge permits, it is the sheer volume of the nutrient load coming through that is impacting on water quality.
Munnik is an independent environmental researcher working in Johannesburg. - Cape Times
2 comments:
If you want to see the video clips from Percy Stewart, they're available at the following link:
http://thesilentmajority.co.za/article.php?id=17
Wasted Water - the clickable link above
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