Municipal workers were finishing up a repair on a sewage leak into the Hartbeespoort Dam in the North West on Friday night, the Madibeng municipality said.
Council spokesperson Kenneth Ngubegusha said the leak posed no further danger.
”We are finishing up the repair. It should be done by tonight. We won’t go home until it is done,” he said
The extent of the pollution was being measured, but ”it is nothing to write home about”, Ngubegusha said earlier.
The leak was brought under the council’s attention at about 3pm on Thursday.
Technicians established that a pump was burnt out, causing the pump station to overflow into the dam.
Pump suppliers had closed by the time the council wanted to place an order on Thursday, but a replacement was being installed by Friday afternoon, Ngubegusha said.
He said the sewage was ”not flooding continuously”, but during periods of peak household water use.
Beeld newspaper earlier quoted Hartbeespoort Water Action Group member Dirk Bouwer as saying residents had discovered a pipe dumping thousands of litres of raw sewage into the dam.
The pipe was several hundred metres from the Madibeng municipality’s water-purification plant, where it sources dam water to purify as drinking water.
Once the problem was fixed, the municipality and the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry would do a proper assessment of the damage, Ngubegusha said.
He could not say how much sewage had leaked into the dam, but said it ”would have been very little”. It was also not known when the leak had started.
In a statement, the council said: ”The drinkable water from the dam is not affected by the problem.”
As a long-term solution, the electrical panel of the pump station will be changed and an extra discharge valve installed and connected to a spare pump.
”The currently existing overflow pipe that leads to the dam will be disconnected immediately,” the council said.
It added that the quality of raw water abstracted from the Crocodile River and treated drinking water from the purification plant is monitored daily, to prevent pollutants from bypassing the system into the water-supply network.
Bouwer was quoted as saying the sewage was not being dumped into the dam by accident.
”This is being done on purpose. The pipe was installed in such a way that the sewage overflow from a nearby pump station could be dumped into the dam.”
Ngubegusha said the pipe, now to be removed, was installed more than 20 years ago.
”We don’t know why it is there.”
The action group demanded that the area where the sewage ”had probably been dumped for several months” be cordoned off and rehabilitated.
It claimed the 500-square-metre site, which included a marsh, was littered with toilet paper and human faeces.
The council said several pump station and manhole overflows in the area in recent months, some due to power failures and other to blockages, have all been fixed. — Sapa