To add a little romance to your Valentine’s Day beach visit at the start of the year, we brought you the unsettling news that the mussels, starfish and seaweed on the Atlantic Seaboard are contaminated with sewage and pharmaceuticals.

Back then, the City of Cape Town said that they were investigating new sewage treatment technologies, but residents should also take responsibility for what they flush down toilets and drains.

Cool. I get not flushing chemicals, but there’s not much we can do about the rest.

Moving on to September, and recent reports suggest that the sewage and chemical infused beaches aren’t our only problem here in Cape Town.

This, from GroundUp:

Some of Cape Town’s rivers and canals are so polluted they are essentially open streams of sewage, and although the City of Cape Town is aware of this, the water and waste directorate has vastly underspent its budget for the past two financial years.

Participants in the annual Peninsula Paddle, an event organised by scientists and environmentalists to paddle the interlinked waterways from Muizenberg to Paarden Eiland, were taken aback by the state of the rivers when they kayaked on 8 September.

It really is quite sad that we can’t kayak on our rivers, and it looks like things are only getting worse.

The plastic waste was the worst they had seen in ten years of the event, said Dr Kevin Winter of UCT’s Future Water Institute, who helps coordinate the Peninsula Paddle.

…“As paddlers we shouldn’t even have been on the water,” Winter said.

The worst affected waterways were the Steenberg Canal and the Black River, which flows past Observatory and northwards along the M5, to exit to sea at Paarden Eiland.

The Steenberg canal was filled not only with plastic trash, but dead dogs and cats, and electronic goods. And in the Black River, the paddlers were surprised by a floating island of plastic trapped by hyacinth. Water samples taken in the Black River for E.coli – a microbiological indicator species – revealed colony forming unit (cfu) counts of up to, and in places over, a million per 100 ml.

That’s a horrid number when you consider that national guidelines say anything more than 4 000 cfu per 100ml is deemed unacceptable.

For those who aren’t keen to crunch the numbers, that means some areas are 250 times above what is deemed OK, and a count of a million cfu per 100ml is consistent with untreated sewage.

As mentioned previously, the City has been underspending when it comes to water sanitation, despite the obvious need for action:

Reports tabled in the Committee meeting note that only R1.5bn out of a water and sanitation department capital expenditure budget of R2.3bn had been spent in the 2018-19 financial year ending 30 June. That is only 64.5% of the budget.

In the previous financial year, only 55% of the capital expenditure budget was spent.

And spending does not seem to have improved so far this financial year. In July, the first month of the 2019-20 financial year, only R7.1m of the capital expenditure allocation of R36.6m for that month had been spent. Expenditure figures for August were not presented. The department believes expenditure will increase to reach the 90% spend target over the next 11 months.

Although the City has water quality data updated monthly for inland water bodies and fortnightly for coastal waters, it does not tell the public the results of the water quality tests. No results have been presented at subcouncil meetings since 2013 and the last data set available to the public is from 2016. A promised new report showing the results of the water quality tests across the metro has been delayed for almost a year, with no reason given other than the report has to proceed through council.

Well, now you know.

So don’t go kayaking, or heaven forbid, swimming, in any of these local rivers or canals until the City gets its act together.

[source:groundup]