Durban - The Adopt a River team and the surfing community have warned that water in the Mngeni River is highly toxic as a result of years of unchecked pollution.
During a clean-up campaign last week, local surfing guru Jean Marc Tostee said the water was discoloured because of the sewage that had been flowing into it for an extended period of time.
“In the muck at Mngeni River, you can see the colour of the water where the unprocessed sewage is flowing into the river water because the filtration pumps haven’t worked for months or years,” he said.
Tostee said a safe E coli reading in the water would be less than 500ppm (parts per million), but at the Bird Park where the sewerage system was overflowing into the river, the recent test taken by Adopt a River and processed at Talbot lab resulted in a reading of 975 000ppm.
“It’s raw sewage at this point. Very toxic.”
However, Tostee and the other volunteers were surprised that the readings done at the city’s main beaches made for much more positive reading: they all tested lower than 200ppm for several consecutive weeks.
“This stuff breaks down in the sea by the time it reaches the surf breaks, so all of the town beaches are 100% safe. And they have stayed at this same level for six weeks in a row now.”
Tostee said the readings done by the municipality, with its outdated equipment, could not be trusted.
He also questioned why the municipality had closed the beaches and scared the public when its data was wrong.
“We’ll keep fighting until these pumps are fixed,” he said.
The municipality’s spokesperson, Msawakhe Mayisela said it was working hard to deal with all contamination.
“We are aware that water quality has improved on most of our beaches. We therefore request a space to finalise our next course of action. We understand the frustration and interest all our stakeholders have in this regard and sincerely apologise for inconvenience.”
Two weeks ago the city announced that several beaches would be opened after tests confirmed the water was at an acceptable level for recreational activities.
Those beaches included Laguna Beach, Country Club Beach, Battery Beach, South Beach, Thekwini Beach, Addington Beach and Point Beach.
However, several other beaches remained closed until further notice. These included Westbrook, Bronze, uMhlanga, eMdloti, Isipingo, Reunion, Pipeline, Toti Main, Warner, Baggies, Winklespruit, Garvies and Ansteys beaches.
The Independent on Saturday