NATIONAL NEWS - Retired coal mine worker Hendrik Tlaudi suffers from a “bad back” and has to take medication daily. But Tlaudi, who lives in a state-subsidised house with his widowed sister in Winburg, Free State, cannot simply pour a glass of water from the tap to help him swallow his pills.
Like everyone else in the town, he has to boil it first or risk illness because the municipal water supply is often contaminated with bacteria from human faeces.
But like most people living in the poorer section of the town and surviving on social grants, Tlaudi does not always have enough money to buy the electricity needed to boil the water. Sometimes his sister’s two teenage children have to go and forage for firewood.
Part of the reason Winburg’s water is contaminated is because the effluent released from the wastewater treatment works flows directly into the dam used for drinking water. This would be acceptable if the sewage was properly treated, and if the water purifying plant was functioning properly.
But the water purification plant appeared dilapidated and not functioning at all when GroundUp visited it in March. Entry was barred, but from the outside it was clear standard building maintenance had not taken place.
Shrubs and small trees could be seen growing from the gutters and from cracks in the walls. In town, no one dares to drink the water.
Meanwhile at the water treatment works, a municipal worker showed us a critical pump that had not been working for three weeks for want of a fan belt. The aerator pump also did not have a fan belt, and the sludge remover did not have a hose.
“All I can do is add chlorine,” he said.
He said storm water from recent rains was flowing through the sewage ponds, stirring up the sludge, and spilling out to the dam from which drinking water was extracted.
Sewage wasn’t even getting to the wastewater treatment works, he said, instead it was flowing to the dam from a broken down pump station further up the line. (The employee is not named as he was not authorised to speak to the media.)
For drinking water, total faecal coliforms (bacteria present in human and animal waste, of which there are many) can be a maximum of ten per 100ml and E.coli should be zero.
But data on the national Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) Integrated Regulatory Information System (IRIS), shows Winburg’s municipal water supply currently meets national microbiological quality guidelines only 56% of the time. It complies with disinfectant standards just 11% of the time.
The minimum compliance levels are set out in the wastewater treatment works’ authorisation issued by the DWS.
The Winburg wastewater treatment works, as of 18 June, scored zero for all three indicators. This is indicates that the municipality has not achieved the basic requirement of providing regular test results to the regulator.
A contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity said he oversaw upgrades to the sewage pump stations and refurbishment of the wastewater treatment works in 2020. As part of the contract the company installed a generator to ensure the works continued to function during load shedding.
But he said after they completed the work, which included fixing the aerators essential to purifying the sewage, “some genius” in the municipality decided to move the generator to another facility.
But the electrical lines ran through the generator so without it, there was no power at all at the wastewater treatment works. Rewiring it was a simple job for any qualified electrician, yet this was never done.
He said the company also advised the municipality that it needed to replace the town’s sewerage pipes, which were old asbestos pipes which were continually breaking. “They were breaking in people’s yards,” he said.
All effluent from the wastewater treatment works, as well as sewage from broken sewerage lines and pump stations flowed to the dam from which drinking water was drawn, but even if the water purifying plant at the dam was working properly, it wasn’t designed to clean water contaminated by sewage, he said.
