Billions for wastewater plants

IT WILL cost the City R8 billion over the next 10 years to upgrade its wastewater treatment works to ensure optimal efficiency.

The state of the City’s treatment plants was flagged in the auditorgeneral’s (AG) report on the financial performance of municipalities for 2020/21 released last week. The report put a spotlight on the lack of repairs and maintenance of key infrastructure by municipalities.

The report found that the final effluent at wastewater treatment plants across the city did not comply with licence requirements and the minimum limits for chloride.

The amount of suspended solids and E. coli were also found to have been significantly exceeded.

The City said it had allocated more than R586 million towards upgrading and increasing the capacity of its water and sanitation infrastructure in the 2022/23 financial year.

Plants earmarked included Potsdam, Zandvliet, Athlone and Macassar and the Cape Flats plants.

The national Department of Water and Sanitation awarded most of the city’s wastewater systems the Green Drop Certification status.

Water service authorities across the country were subjected to the Green Drop Audit from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021.

Green Drop Certification is awarded to wastewater systems that obtain scores of above 90% when compared against the criteria set for wastewater management, while a system that achieved less than 31% is regarded as a dysfunctional system which would require appropriate interventions.

The Green Drop report also noted that some municipal wastewater systems were in a critical state including 11% in the Western Cape. However, the breakdown of these facilities was not immediately available.

While experts said the situation in the Western Cape was not as bad as in the rest of the country, they warned that maintenance and repair of infrastructure could not be “put off” by authorities.

They said numerous and frequent raw sewage discharges and overflows as a result of lack of repairs and maintenance of the wastewater treatment plants caused a significant impact on residents and environmental health.

The experts also believed that maintenance of infrastructure was inadequate in South Africa.

Professor of chemistry at the University of Western Cape Leslie Petrik said the Green Drop report did not show the full picture of the “dismal state” of the plants locally and countrywide.

Petrik said the city’s wastewater treatment plants did not have the capacity to deal with the everincreasing load of sewage from the growing population.

She called for an urgent expansion and upgrade of the facilities, as well as diligent and frequent maintenance, than “is the current practice”.

Factors that contributed to the deterioration of wastewater treatment plants varied.

An epidemiologist at the University of Stellenbosch, Dr Joe Barnes, said repairing existing infrastructure and keeping it functioning was more difficult than building new.

“It takes experience and a good deal of training to maintain a system that is already running or functioning.

“Such experience is in critical short supply among our municipal staff,” said Barnes.

She also believed that problems caused by lack of maintenance often only showed up when the problems were far advanced.

“When complaints come in, the damage has often been done and those at present in the posts feel that they were not responsible or accountable for the damage. Thus few officials want to take ownership of these problems,” said Barnes.

A second complication is that the responsibility for running some of those systems are shared by different departments within the governmental structure and co-operation and synchronisation between these different structures are dysfunctional at times.

Barnes warned that no infrastructure problem could be solved by putting off repairs.

“Many people frequently fall ill because of the dirty environment they live in, the lack of water to clean themselves, etc. They lose their jobs because of absenteeism and that further impoverishes them,” said Barnes.

The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) said even though the City’s wastewater treatment plants were among the better performing plants in the country, this did not relieve them of their duty to comply with safety standards and their Water Use Licences.

The AG report also noted that some of the container toilets in the city were unhygienic.