Cape Town - More than 100 volunteer citizens will test the quality of drinking water across South Africa this week.
The national water-testing week project, from September 14 to 18, is led by WaterCAN, an initiative of Outa, and is a network of citizen science activists and community organisations who advocate for clean, safe and sustainable water.
WaterCAN’s network aims to test water across the country in spots including Cape Town, Gqeberha, Isipingo, Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, West Rand, the Vaal River and Bloemfontein.
WaterCAN has supplied the volunteers with iLAB testing kits that assess more than 10 drinking water parameters that include a metals test and an E. coli test.
Volunteers will test water in sources in their area. This could be a stream, river, dam or tap water.
“This is only the beginning of our path to monitor and track the quality of our water supplies from taps, rivers, boreholes. We want to expand this project so that we have thousands of people regularly testing our water. And where there are concerns, we need to act fast and use our activism to hold those responsible accountable,” said WaterCAN manager Dr Ferrial Adam.
“South Africa’s water resources are in a dire state and require all of us to become water guardians to monitor and protect this precious resource. As we move forward, we need people to be our eyes, ears and voices on the ground to monitor and protect our water but also to hold those responsible accountable.”
WaterCAN also called on municipalities and water utilities to test routinely for harmful chemicals in our drinking water and make their results public.
In recent months, there have been two concerning reports that emphasise the need for drinking water to be tested for harmful substances such as vanadium and other hazardous chemicals, WaterCAN said.
The first relates to pollution in the Vaal River for more than five years with toxic substances such as vanadium, diethanolamine and potassium carbonate.
The second is a study that was conducted by the Mangosuthu University of Technology and the Council for Geosciences that found high concentrations of harmful elements (silver, arsenic, cobalt, chromium, manganese and vanadium, which were higher than the amount permissible by the World Health Organization) in the Krugersdorp Game Reserve.
For more information, visit: http://watercan.org.za/
Cape Times