Water Affairs visits sewage spills

On Wednesday representatives from the local and provincial department of water affairs accompanied Councillor Beyers Smit on a tour of the various sites along the Nyl/Mogalakwena river where sewage is leaking into the river system.  Smit, who accompanied the water affairs officials on behalf of the Nyl Action Group, explained that the problems with Mokopane’s sewage system has been dragging on for four years.
He said that the local municipality is to blame for many of the problems, but that some problems were created by contractors who installed services in the RDP developments.
“In these cases the municipality and officials from the former department of local government and housing are shifting blame and responsibility from one to the other,” he said.
Smit, however, told officials that the entire sewage mess boils down to insufficient and inefficient infrastructure.
At one of the areas where sewage regularly flows from a manhole down to the river, a local resident told officials that the municipality came to repair the leaking drain two weeks ago after the Northern News reported on the matter. She said before the newspaper report the sewage was flowing unabatedly.
This week a new leak had sprung, not 800 metres from where the previous one had been repaired.
“To fix this problem is going to cost a lot of money,” Smit commented.
“A decision will have to be made to avail more money for the upgrading of the sewers, the current budget only allows for patch jobs that seldom last more than a few weeks, extra funds will have to be allocated through the IDP’s budget.”
Meanwhile council on Tuesday voted in favour of foregoing attempts to reclaim R80 million in wasteful and unauthorised expenditures by the municipality.