The Devastating Effects of Pollution in our Rivers and Dams

Triggered by the headline- grabbing news of multiple deaths in Hammanskraal, the story spread like wildfire as the media decided to follow it.

Within a few days of the initial deaths being reported in the Pretoria area, news broke that cholera had been isolated in other parts of the country, including the Vaal River at Parys. At the time of writing, we now have 23 deaths, but the crisis has yet to pass.

The literature on cholera makes for interesting reading. In 1961 there was a global outbreak that came to be known as the Seventh Cholera Pandemic. This saw a strain of the pathogen – Vibrio cholerae biotype El Tor – – rapidly spreading around the world. The WHO now regards cholera arising from this pandemic as having become endemic in many countries as a result. The El Tor variant started in Indonesia in 1961 and spread via Bangladesh into the then-Soviet Union. By 1973 it had reached Europe, Africa, and Japan. The rapid spread of the disease was aided by modern transportation and human migration. The initial mortality rate of 50% caused considerable alarm, so the WHO advised the implementation of a coherent protocol, which was successfully implemented across the world. As a result, the mortality dropped to 3% over the next three decades. 

The El Tor strain has persisted for decades, with outbreaks recorded sporadically until the present day. Cholera is a serious matter that deserves our full attention.

Which brings us to South Africa in 2023. It is a common cause that our wastewater treatment plants are in a shocking state of disrepair. The Green Drop Reporting Standard, used to monitor the performance of our 850 municipal sewage works, was suspended by Minister Nomvula Mokonyane because the data was becoming an embarrassment to the government. When this was reinstated by Minister Senzo Mchunu, the shocking reality became apparent, with around 40% being totally non-functional, and less than 10% being fully compliant. We release around 5 billion litres of sewage daily into our rivers and dams, the majority of which is at best partially treated.  But, in South Africa, we practice a system of indirect reuse, because our more than 1,000 bulk water treatment plants abstract our drinking water from the very same rivers, often near known sewage discharge points. None of our bulk water plants was ever designed to produce potable water from sewage-contaminated feedstock, which is why it is vital that our sewage works sustain 100% regulatory compliance.   

This enables us to contextualise the current cholera crisis because in truth, we simply do not know how severe the situation is. What we do know are the following facts:

Fact # 1: Almost half of our sewage works are totally dysfunctional, discharging untreated sewage into our rivers. 

Fact # 2: Less than 10% of our sewage works are fully compliant, leaving the rest in partial compliance at best. The Water and Sanitation Master Plan acknowledges that around two-thirds of all sewage plants are in poor or critical condition.  

Fact # 3: Cholera is directly associated with sewage-contaminated water. 

Fact # 4: The Water and Sanitation Master Plan acknowledges that almost half of all potable water treatment plants are in poor or critical condition. This means that public trust and confidence in government-managed systems is rapidly declining. 

Fact # 5: We simply do not know if the sewage crisis is going to be brought under control any time soon, so we must adopt the precautionary principle by planning for the worst while hoping for the best. 

In my professional opinion, our national sewage crisis is simply out of control, and it is only a matter of time before we start to see a bigger human health crisis playing out. The quantum of money needed to fix the problem is in the order of one trillion Randrand, and the political will to actually do something about it is simply not there beyond the knee-jerk reaction to the Hammanskraal tragedy. 

This means that people living in residential estates and sectional title schemes will increasingly be confronted by a new reality – do they trust the incoming water supplied by the local municipality? Consensus on this topic is not going to be easy to achieve, so two binary options are generally available to individuals. The easiest option is to adapt your own lifestyle by actively preventing direct contact with foodstuff and water that has not been adequately processed. This is not easy to do, because vegetables purchased in supermarkets are a known vector of waterborne disease, which implies trust between the consumer and supermarket. The self-sufficiency option means that each homeowner will then be free to determine whether they are going to install a water treatment device at their own expense, and under their direct personal control. 

The more difficult option, but also the most cost-effective one, would be for the residential estate or body corporate to deal with the matter at that level of scale. This would require reaching a consensus on the need to pay for the communal effort to upgrade the existing water infrastructure within the estate. Experience has shown me just how difficult this is to do, simply because the average citizen is uninformed about the risks they are facing. The likelihood of getting this onto an agenda, and then obtaining the necessary votes to make a legally binding decision, is quite low. 

The reader is urged to follow the cholera story as it becomes interwoven with the sewage crisis and the Eskom load-shedding tragedy. Each of these is a powerful story in its own right, but collectively they can literally become a matter of life or death.