Cape Town’s sewage crisis poses growing threat to health and coastlines

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JEREMY MAGGS: Cape Town, I see faces a mounting sewage crisis that has serious implications for public health, the environment and the economy.

The city is acknowledging it will need at least R12 billion to overhaul ageing marine sewage outfalls and wastewater infrastructure. It’s a problem that has seen millions of litres of untreated sewage discharged into coastal waters daily, and that has triggered legal and community pressure for more urgent action.

I want to give you a broad, expert overview of the situation, and I’m in conversation now with Professor Leslie Petrik, emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of the Western Cape.

Professor, a very warm welcome to you. Maybe a starting point for some context, could you paint a picture for us of the scale and maybe the nature of the contamination that the city is currently facing? How bad is it?

LESLIE PETRIK: Well, first thing we need to recognise is that this problem exists all over the country. We’re dealing with ailing or failing infrastructure everywhere in every city.

There’s simply not been enough budget allocation to sort the problem out, and insufficient political will to sort the problem out.

At least in Cape Town, generally, our Green Drop reports show that our wastewater treatment plants are fair instead of poor or completely defunct.

But having said that, the fact that we have only got fair operational conditions on our wastewater treatment plant indicates that these wastewater treatment plants are not working optimally in most cases.

One must realise that there are many wastewater treatment plants around Cape Town. Three of them in particular are not wastewater treatment plants. They are simply pump stations and those are the pump stations that service the marine outfalls.

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They’re collecting sewage all the way from Salt River to around Hout Bay that is just simply macerated and pumped out to sea, completely raw, untreated and unfortunately that affects our Blue Flag beaches from time to time.

It also affects the amount of bacterial and chemical pollution that is going into our sea, that is affecting our marine organisms.

The city has started talking about the possible scenarios to try and solve the problem of the untreated wastewater that’s going into the ocean, and that is where that budget comes from.

Now, one needs to realise that Cape Town imports more or less all its drinking water. At the moment that is, I would say, two thirds reporting to wastewater, because some of it gets used on gardens and so on.

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All of that volume of water is then turned into effluent that is pumped through the various wastewater treatment plants that are existing and those effluents that go to sea through our rivers and through our estuaries and through surf zone discharges are also full of phosphates and nitrates and bacteria.

They might have some of the solids removed through the wastewater treatment plant. But the solids removal does not take all those chemicals out.

JEREMY MAGGS: Professor, do you have a view on the public health risk potential, both immediate and longer term, associated with that discharge that you’re talking about? That surely is of accelerating concern.

LESLIE PETRIK: Well, the city tests for indicative organisms Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Enterococci, and lately they are only testing for Enterococci. They do not test regularly for viruses or pathogens, pathogens being disease causing organisms.

According to their report on the Enterococci, the beaches are supposedly safe. But you only need one pathogen to give you a really serious infection. We are finding from reports by beach users and sea users that things like enteritis, runny tummies, ear infections, eye infections, skin infections are definitely a problem.

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As far as I know, there has been no health survey of the amount of people reporting to hospitals with enteritis over the summer.

Obviously, it’s very difficult to distinguish between whether somebody picked up an infection on the beach or whether they picked it up from food that was left standing. It’s easy for the city to just ignore those statistics because they just revert and say that it’s caused by some failure in the food chain.

JEREMY MAGGS: Professor, let me ask you this. The city, as I mentioned at the start of this conversation, says it requires around R12 billion for a long-term fix. From a scientific and infrastructure perspective. Do you think that figure is realistic? Is it a high, low or maybe just a start?

LESLIE PETRIK: Well, I think it’s just a start. Fixing up our infrastructure is going to be extremely costly.

That is really the big problem in South Africa, throughout the country, we have not allocated sufficient budget to keep our infrastructure in shape.

One of the problems in Cape Town, for instance, is that we have frequent sewage pipe bursts or blockages and overflows that go into the stormwater drain. Our stormwater drains are also sources of sewage going into the sea. Remember, the stormwater drain goes directly to the ocean.

Unfortunately, you can’t just throw that budget at the wastewater treatment plant. You also have to throw it at all the infrastructure, piping and pump stations, and that needs constant maintenance.

R12 billion I think was the rough estimate for the three marine outfalls.

We need to understand that every time those marine outfalls have come up as a point of discussion, the city government, or fathers, whatever one wants to call them, each time have decided to go for just carrying on, pumping it into the ocean.

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This has been going on since the late 18th century.

Those marine outfalls, especially the one at Green Point, has been in place for more than 140 years, roughly. Although there have been several plans put forward over the years, even starting from 1880 onwards, and it always ended up with the city deciding to carry on pumping it to the sea because it’s cheaper.

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JEREMY MAGGS: Professor, I’m going to leave it there and thank you very much indeed for that assessment. I’ve been in conversation with Professor Leslie Petrik, emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of the Western Cape. Professor, thank you so much.

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