Another flashpoint is Cape Town’s three marine outfalls that pump 28m litres of partially treated wastewater into the sea on average daily, about a third of a mile to a mile from shore at depths of 20-40 metres.
This is the municipal water system.
On a clear summer’s day in Cape Town, the Milnerton Lagoon was serene, reflecting the bright blue sky and Table Mountain. But there was an unmistakable stench, and up close, the water was murky.
A few hundred metres away, adults and children played in the water as it flowed into Table Bay. On the boardwalk, a sign read: “Polluted water: for health reasons, swimming and recreational activities are at your own risk.”
“I woke up at midnight from the sewage smell,” said Caroline Marx, who lives in a property overlooking the lagoon and has been campaigning against the pollution since 2013.
“They had this catastrophic pollution [in 2020] where the lagoon went grey, milky, it stank like you can’t believe. And when it finally cleared everything was dead … every time it recovers, there’s another spill.”
Not capitalism…..
As a kid, back in the 1970s, I can remember visiting Filey in East Yorkshire and there being turds and bog paper floating in the sea. In the early 1980s I worked at a holiday camp there and the problem seemed to have been resolved. Presumably a waste water treatment plant had come on line by that time.
True
State run utility
But state run utility in Africa
There’s that added little spice just to make it all a lot worse.
Remember that mass poisoning of the water supply in Camelford? When a delivery driver tipped a tanker load of aluminium sulphate into the drinking water rather than the initial treatment tanks. And the establishment blob said “Nothing to see here, move along. The water is just fine to drink, just add some orange squash to cover the taste”.
That was when the system was nationalised.
Didn’t happen when the Boer were running the place.
Just as Canada’s worst water quality disaster, the E. coli outbreak in Walkerton, Ontario, was caused by the incompetence of two municipal employees, but has somehow been turned into an indictment of private operators because the Provincial testing labs had been privatized a year or two earlier.
In that case, given that too few samples were taken, samples were routinely mislabeled as to source, and the clown-show operators didn’t know what to do about the test results anyway, it’s hard to see how the ownership of the labs had any effect on the outcome. But that was the argument for public ownership, kids.
Actually Cape Town is a well functioning municipality (by African standards) and the Mayor has made it a priority to clean up the waterways and the sewage system. This is a monumental task, which is costing a huge amount of money. If Starmer or his predecessors had functioning brains, they would have ensured that Foreign Office funding went to projects like this rather than woke NGOs.
Didn’t Cape Colony struggle to avoid being incorporated in the Union of South Africa, fought to retain its non-racial elections and government, but the UK Government told them: shut up, it’s happening.