Here’s something that will help out our pretty city and keep her looking clean: Cape Town’s water and sanitation department has employed a new member to the team who doesn’t mind getting dirty feet at all.

It’s called “The Crawler” and it’s going to be the eyes for the operators trained to deal with blockages and spills.

The device is suspended into a sewer manhole and placed on the pipe floor, ready to move forward or backward, tilt its camera around, and shine its lights on surfaces which hardly see the light of day.

Weighing in at a slight 10kg, The Crawler is part of a R2.4million project that should help prevent future problems in the sewers of the city. With parts brought in from Germany and Sweden, there are expected to be three more on the way. Utility services mayoral committee member Ernest Sonnenberg spoke to News24 and told them that very often “a lot of foreign objects are deposited into the sewer line and remain undetected until they become a big problem”. The one good thing is that it can’t really go on a service delivery strike…

Here’s hoping it doesn’t get lost in those deep dark depths because I’m not sure anyone is going to want to go and find it. Some of Cape Town’s sewer pipes are “between a metre and 12m beneath the surface” and let’s not even begin to imagine squeezing into a space that’s less then one meter in diameter.

[Source: News24]