‘It is too dirty,” said Mama Mahlangu describing the stream flowing next to an informal settlement outside Bethal in Mpumalanga. She has no access to running water and the stream is being polluted by a waste water treatment plant. She lives less than a metre from the stream, but every day Mahlangu walks 5km to collect clean running water.
Mahlangu’s is one of about 20 families who have erected their shacks on the banks of the streams surrounding the Bethal Waste Water Treatment Plant, owned and operated by the Govan Mbeki municipality. Hundreds more people with no access to running water live near the streams.
In 2000 the municipality was sued for failing to maintain good water quality in the streams surrounding the plant. A farmer, Kerneels Uys, won a high court case at the end of 2000 against the municipality after his cattle started dying; the court found that raw sewage was present in the streams where the cattle drank and that the sewage had come from the plant.
When the municipality failed to clean up the streams, Uys went to court again. This time the municipality was held in contempt of court and fined.
In March 2003 the parties settled out of court, but Uys has continued with a civil action. Uys — who has sold his farm — claims the water is still polluted, and this time the danger is to the health of children from the settlement who swim in the streams on hot days.
The sewerage plant is supposed to purify the raw sewage. The court found that there was bad management of the pumping stations at the plant. The presence of sewage from the squatters themselves is minimal in the river.
The families in the Bethal settlement have good reason to distrust the water. When the Mail & Guardian visited the site, dirty, stinking water was being pumped from the overflow dams surrounding the sewage plant into the surrounding streams. The streams run directly into the Blesbokspruit, which in turn flows into the Vaal Dam — where the water is treated again.
Though Uys’s court victory should have ensured that the people from the informal settlements and their children are no longer at risk, the farmer claims the court case has changed nothing and the municipality is still pumping polluted water into the streams surrounding the plant.
During the court cases Uys had several companies, including the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS), test the water in the streams as well as the Blesbokspruit into which the streams flow. ”During 2002 the council also submitted water samples that claimed they had cleaned up the stream. But our experts’ samples proved different and the judge agreed with us,” Uys said.
Joseph Barnard, acting municipal manager, said the case was related to the farm owner’s cattle, ”which were affected by the purified sewage and not human settlements”.
The municipality told the M&G that no pollution is currently taking place at the plant and claimed their latest tests showed that the water conformed to the legal standards of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry.
Barnard conceded, however, that one of the stations pumping sewage to the plant might sometimes be out of order for a short period. ”What then happens is that sewage is diverted to the overflow dams situated at the relevant pump station.”
The water in the streams, he said, is purified sewage water. ”Once the purified sewage flows into the river it complies with the standards of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry related to raw water [which has to be purified again] and not purified water.”
”If there is a need that I must drink water from the stream [adjacent to the sewage works] with no other option I will do so,” he said.