‘Superbugs’ breed in city’s polluted waters

Steve Kretzmann3 October 2021Children play at Zandvlei mouth as it runs out to sea at Muizenberg. The water has for months been too polluted for recreational use.
The ongoing and widespread pollution of Cape Town’s waterways is contributing to antibiotic resistance, which is a growing and serious global health problem, according to pre-eminent scientists.
The pollution is caused by sewage spills, human and chemical waste being discarded into the storm water system, and poorly treated effluent released from waste water treatment works.
It is well documented that pharmaceutical compounds, including antibiotics, are found in sewage.
As a result, bacteria exposed to low levels of antibiotics and other persistent chemical compounds, develop antibiotic resistance, leading to the emergence of ‘superbugs’.
Widespread pollution
For the first time in Cape Town’s history, all its popular recreational water bodies – Zandvlei, Rietvlei, Zeekoevlei, and the Milnerton Lagoon – have been closed for months due to ongoing pollution, largely related to chronic sewage inflows.
In the past, these water bodies have been individually closed for short periods due to temporary pollution incidents that pose a health risk for even intermediate contact use such as kayaking, sailing, and fishing, but never all of them together or for such an extended period.
Zandvlei at Muizenberg, plagued by numerous sewage spills resulting in temporary closures last year, was closed for recreational use on 25 May, having only been partially reopened on Friday 1 October.
Rietvlei near Milnerton, which in the past five years was only closed for a week in 2019 due to a toxic algal bloom, was closed to public use on 24 June due to water quality tests revealing e.coli – a bacteria indicating faeces in the water – being above the acceptable limit.
Ongoing sewage spills then resulted in Zeekoevlei being closed on 15 July. At the time of writing, all three of these water bodies remained closed.
Meanwhile, pollution of Milnerton Lagoon, which receives effluent from the Potsdam Waste Water Treatment Works, resulted in the Green Scorpions (the provincial environmental management inspectorate) issuing a directive to the City of Cape Town in November last year, ordering the City to clean it up.
The directive was appealed by the City but legal project manager at the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse, Andrea Korff, says the City submitted their response to the Green Scorpions on 27 August. Korff said OUTA has requested sight of this response but have as yet to receive a copy.
Korff said last week the City stated they would receive feedback from the Green Scorpions in two weeks time.
Meanwhile, head of the Milnerton Central Residents Association environmental portfolio, Caroline Marx, said the City’s own tests showed “shockingly high” levels of e.coli in the lagoon.
She said as a result, the lagoon remains closed for recreational water users.
Drug resistance
In June, Mother City News reported on a recently published peer-reviewed scientific paper revealing the antibiotic Sulfamethoxazole is present in False Bay’s water. It, along with other pharmaceutical compounds, was present in the sediment, seaweed, and marine invertebrates such as mussels, limpets, sea snails, sea urchins, and starfish.
The study by scientists Cecilia Y. Ojemaye and Leslie Petrik from the University of the Western Cape’s Chemistry Department showed Sulfamethoxazole and other pharmaceutical compounds such as Diclofenac (Voltaren) were accumulating up the marine food chain.
The pharmaceutical compounds enter the environment from waste water, but waste water treatment technology does not remove these persistent chemical compounds which enter the waste stream due to their not being fully metabolised by users, or due to unused or expired medication being flushed into the sewerage system. Additionally, waste water from hospitals and clinics, highly likely to contain pharmaceutical compounds including antibiotics, flow to municipal waste water treatment works which often do not meet national minimum treatment guidelines for the removal of bacteria.
This results in bacteria such as e.coli, as well as more dangerous bacteria such as Salmonella and Hepatitus A being exposed to low levels of antibiotics released into the environment, and developing resistance.
In their paper (Environment Around False Bay, Cape Town, South Africa: Occurrence and Risk-Assessment Study – published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in March this year) Petrik and Ojemaye note that Sulfamethoxazole accumulates in edible seaweeds. This meant “this compound could result in the development of antibiotic resistance by humans and other marine organisms that consume this seaweed and many others”.
Senior Lecturer Emeritus in the Division of Community Health at Stellenbosch University, Dr Jo Barnes, has been involved in overseeing students testing antibiotic resistance in bacteria such as e.coli for almost a decade.
Barnes said continual exposure to low levels of antibiotics, such as would be found in the sewage spills into Cape Town’s vleis and estuaries, would result in bacteria developing resistance.
She said antibiotic resistance, which led to the development of antibiotic resistant superbugs is a global concern, and research has found antibiotic resistant bacteria in the environment is linked to human waste water contamination.
Barnes said for decades, the medical fraternity was blamed for prescribing antibiotics when they were not needed, and people not disposing their antibiotic medication once they felt better rather than continuing the entire course. This meant bacteria that had not been killed were the stronger organisms, and developed a resistance to the medication.
She said normally there’d be a progressive resistance, with bacteria developing a resistance to weaker antibiotics and resistance gradually increasing as stronger antibiotics were introduced.
However, with the “massive pollution” ranging from waste water treatment plants being poorly managed, to industrial chemicals discharged into the waste water stream and sometimes directly into water bodies via storm water systems, bacteria have “jumped” the antibiotic levels.
“They (bacteria) are so strong that when they meet an antibiotic they just smile and go to tea,” said Barnes.
She said she oversaw research by students sampling the Plankenbrug River flowing past Kayamandi in Stellenbosch in 2001/2002. The tests showed a 60% resistance to antibiotics by e.coli in the samples. Kayamandi is only serviced by a clinic that dispenses first order, or low-level antibiotics, she said. When the same tests were conducted by visiting American students she was overseeing in 2019, the antibiotic resistance was 100%. This meant the same antibiotics being dispensed at the Kayamandi clinic would now have no effect on the bacteria causing the same illnesses.
“We are running out of drugs” to treat infections, said Barnes, and because human waste contained antibiotic compounds, ongoing sewage pollution in the environment was accelerating this problem.
Causes of pollution
City mayco member for water and waste, Xanthea Limberg says the majority of sewage overflows causing the pollution of rivers, vleis, and estuaries, are linked to people dumping solid objects in the sewers, illegally disposing of hazardous chemicals, as well as sewer pumps failing or being damaged due to theft or illegal dumping into the sewer system.
However, Marx believes in the case of Milnerton Lagoon, the main polluter is the City itself, as the City’s Potsdam Waste Water Treatment Works fails to treat waste water to minimum standard before releasing it into the Diep River. Marx said water quality tests below the treatment works’ outlet revealed far higher levels of e.coli than tests taken upstream of the outlet.
The national Department of Water and Sanitation dashboard publishing the results of monthly effluent quality tests of waste water treatment works show a number of the City’s treatment works are failing to meet the minimum guidelines. The Athlone WWTW, for example, achieved only 7.1% compliance for microbiological compliance over the last three months. This means high levels of e.coli and other bacteria from human waste has been flowing into the Black River, into which the Athlone plant discharges treated effluent at a rate of 105 million litres per day.
The Mitchell’s Plain, Cape Flats, Potsdam, Parow, Macassar, and Potsdam waste water treatment works are all indicated as failing.
Limberg said the City was inspecting the various catchments for factors that can be contributing to continued pollution levels so that these can be addressed.
“Work is under way to address infrastructural challenges as best as possible, and education and awareness programmes, such as the ‘Bin It, Don’t Block It’ campaign, are being undertaken around how to avoid sewer blockages,” she stated.
Limberg said Cape Town has experienced “unprecedented levels of new human settlements being established”. This created challenges such as obstruction of access to infrastructure for maintenance work, “and constraints to the provision of basic services.” [...]
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Steve Kretzmann2 September 2021In trying to be ‘world-class’, City may be hoodwinked by slick sales pitch.
The electric version of the Formula 1 Grand Prix – Formula E – will be racing around the streets of Green Point and Mouille Point in February next year, and the City is ponying up R48m to make it happen.
The budget to support the event and make the streets surrounding the Cape Town stadium suitable for the race through widening certain sections, levelling intersections, and creating pitstop areas was passed by the city council on Thursday 19 August. The motivation for the City’s support of the event featuring 24 electrically-powered race cars zooming around Green Point was that it will revive the tourism and events industry which has been depressed by Covid-19 restrictions, and inject about R1.4bn into the local economy.
The Formula E race, which is set to take place in March next year, will be run by e-Movement, which obtained a partnership with Jaguar South Africa and in 2019 submitted an unsolicited bid to the City of Cape Town to host the event. Following a feasibility study which sets out the track along existing roads around the Cape Town Stadium which will have to undergo alterations, the City has agreed to undertake the necessary road works.
The good
In a press statement released prior to the motion being passed by council, mayor Dan Plato stated the event would identify Cape Town as Africa’s racing destination and “unlock major investment, job creation and tourism potential”.
Plato believes the event “offers major potential to local business and will be a huge attraction” for residents. The R44m to be spent on making the roads suitable for the race will be offset by an approximate R1.4bn boost to the city economy, as evidenced by Hong Kong’s experience in hosting the race.
Speaking at the council meeting, mayco member Jean-Pierre Smith said the tourism and hospitality sector was devastated by Covid-19 lockdowns and restrictions, and it was “imperative we get this industry going again and this is the perfect event to do that”.
Smith believed it would attract domestic and international visitors who would spend “a lot of money, a lot more than if we took this meagre amount of money and spent it on jobs in the city”.
He viewed the civil works to be conducted as “upgrades” which would be permanent in a precinct that “has not had a meaningful upgrade since 2009”.
The report to council seeking approval of funds for the event states the race is “a great way to get people excited about the possibilities of engineering and technology”.
The report goes on: “By racing through the streets, the championship acts as a catalyst, helping to refine the design of electric vehicles and improve the driving experience of everyday road users.”
There will also be an e-mobility festival showcasing electric vehicles, an art fair, a celebrity and corporate golf tournament hosted by Ernie Els, a climate change summit, and a concert during the event set to occur over several days.
The bad
ACDP councillor Grant Haskin noted the money spent on altering roads in the Green Point precinct is pulled from roads and transport projects in other parts of the city. This includes R4m from Heideveld and R1,15m from the Jakes Gerwel N1 and N2 interchanges.
“Communities that are disconnected from this event elsewhere in the city will have to wait a further year or two or three before the roads they use everyday will be upgraded in preference for an event held for three or four days once a year,” said Haskin.
He noted the City’s chief financial officer states in the report that there is a likelihood of cost escalations, and these should be brought to council before additional expenditure is incurred.
The plan before council shows certain streets to be used for the race, such as Fritz Sonnenberg Boulevard, need to be widened. The plan shows that after the event, plastic bollards would be used to reinstitute a cycling lane. However, Open Streets Cape Town managing director Kirsten Wilkins said this was a downgrade as at present there was a cycling lane with a landscaped buffer and kerb between cars and cyclists. Removing the plants and replacing them with plastic bollards essentially put cyclists “back in the traffic”.
Wilkins also raised the issue that the money pulled from roads upgrades in other areas involved tampering with the City’s Integrated Development Plan (IDP) which had been through a public participation process, yet there had been no public participation process regarding delaying expenditure in other areas in favour of the Green Point precinct.
She also questioned whether this was the best way to spend R44m to benefit Capetonians.
“I would like to have seen more investigative work done on what that R44m could do for citizens in terms of mobility,” she said. As an example, a proper study on the benefits of a contiguous cycling lane from the metro south area to the city centre might find benefits comparable to the presumed influx of money the Formula E event would bring.
“What benefits would accrue if investing that R44m for the urban poor, to enable people to cycle from Gugulethu to the city centre, for example? What would the knock-on effect be on people saving on the money they spend on taxi fare per month?”
Ross Douglas, who is founder and CEO of Autonomy Paris, the world’s biggest urban mobility event, poured cold water on Plato and Smith’s assertions that the event would underscore Cape Town as a world-class city and invigorate electric vehicle adoption and industry in the city.
Douglas said European cities were eschewing electric vehicles and embracing the concept of the car-free city. They realised electric vehicles were not the solution to global heating. “The end of car ownership is the answer.”
He said particulates from car tyres are the second biggest source of microplastics pollutants in the oceans, and in South Africa, electricity used to charge the vehicles was largely from coal, which undermined any effort to reduce carbon emissions.
Cities such as Paris, London, Berlin and Helsinki, were moving away from global events, investing in startups, and creating the “15-minute city” in which everything residents needed was within a 15-minute walk.
He said big international event companies were “sneaky” in selling themselves to insecure cities such as Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Cape Town, and figures such as a R1.4bn boost to the local economy were fed by the sales team. He was doubtful Cape Town would get the returns it hoped for.
The ugly
Local company, Cape Town Grand Prix South Africa (CTGPSA), believe the City has shown a “blatant disregard” for a fair and open bidding process when it came to hosting the Formula E race.
CTGPSA had approached the City about hosting a Formula 1 Grand Prix within the Green Point precinct for the first time in 2007 and official endorsement was turned down in 2010, although a detailed proposal and business plan was invited for consideration, according to CTGPSA spokesperson Esther Henderson. This included plans for the racetrack, which has been copied in large parts by e-Movement’s submission, raising questions about theft of intellectual property.
Henderson said CTGPSA approached the FIA in 2018 about the rights to host the event in Cape Town in anticipation of their 2021 – 2025 championship season. She said the FIA indicated they would put out a tender and CTGPSA started preparing their submission and contacted the Western Cape Government for support, with the next step being to garner support from the City of Cape Town.
But then they were blind sided by the City’s press conference in June 2019 announcing support for the e-Movement consortium.
“We didn’t realise there was a competitor,” said Henderson.
She said they then secured a meeting with a City official in August 2019 and although endorsement was not offered, they were led to believe they would be part of a fair and transparent bidding process, which never took place.
She said CTGPSA were also told the City would not contribute any money to the event, but are now putting R48m behind it for e-Movement.
Attempts to contact e-Movement were regretfully unsuccessfully, but in council Smith said CTGPSA had not been considered because they had not submitted an events application. [...]
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Steve Kretzmann and Peter Luhanga4 August 2021The path to Cape Town’s teetering public transport is long foretold.
Reeling from the shocking scenes of unrest in KwaZulu Natal and Gauteng, Cape Town experienced chaos of a different kind when the city’s teetering public transport system fell apart on the evening of 19 July.
Tens of thousands of commuters, desperate to get home after a day of work, were left stranded as ongoing taxi violence, in which 24 people were murdered in July alone, brought the minibus taxi industry to a halt. Combined with Golden Arrow running a skeleton service after buses were attacked and a driver shot in the face that very morning, and Metrorail, already running at less than a quarter of their capacity, at 3.08pm announcing the temporary suspension of their southern and Cape Flats lines, 19 July became Cape Town’s public transport day zero.
Although Golden Arrow and Metrorail significantly increased their services, minibus taxi services remain disrupted, affecting people’s ability to get to work, to clinics, and to schools.
Speaking on Thursday 29 July, Cape Town High School deputy principal Liesl van Egeren said absenteeism was at 40% due to pupils from Cape Flats suburbs not being able to commute to school. The Matric class was particularly hard hit, said van Egeren. Contracted or arranged taxi transport to the school was also affected by the continued fear of violence.
Seapoint High School secretary Jessica Fassie said they had an absenteeism rate of about 25% due to continued disruption of the minibus taxi industry, as many pupils travelled in from areas such as Khayelitsha, Gugulethu, and Philippi. “Even if they get here, they are late,” said Fassie.
This is despite provincial transport MEC Daylin Mitchell having closed the contested Bellville – Paarl minibus taxi route which sparked the most recent violent conflict between the CATA and CODETA taxi organisations.
“The situation is dire,” says Khayelitsha Development Forum chairperson Ndithini Tyhido. He said workers are in danger of being fired for being continuously late to work, or having hourly wages docked despite their ability to get to work being beyond their control.
“Without a shred of doubt there are people who have lost their jobs,” said Tyhido. “They are heads of households.”
Cape Town’s station deck, usually a bustle of minibus activity, was all but abandoned on Tuesday 20 July as minibus taxi services ground to a halt amidst ongoing violence. Photo: Ashraf Hendricks/GroundUp
“Hawkers at taxi ranks losing income, taxi drivers, even taxi owners, the entire value chain. The only people benefiting are the hitmen.”
Warning bells
The almost complete public transport breakdown on 19 July and the continued vulnerability of the system was not just due to a series of unfortunate events. There is strong evidence of a lack of political leadership at all spheres of government, and failure to implement progressive public transport planning policy developed within the City of Cape Town.
And like Cape Town’s water day zero – which was averted thanks to water saving efforts by residents, along with the arrival of early winter rains – warnings of a pending disaster have been aired for at least a decade.
A diversity of safe and reliable public transport options are needed if reliance on private taxi operators to perform a public service underpinning the city economy is to be decreased. The City and provincial government recognise rail is a key factor in achieving this. In a press conference on 27 July, Premier Alan Winde stated rail “is the backbone of a transport system”. This has also been stated by Cape Town Mayor Dan Plato. Research consultant Gail Jennings points out rail is not subject to congestion on the roads during peak hours, can carry large numbers of people at once, is safe if managed properly, and has lower carbon emissions than buses, taxis, and cars.
However, Cape Town’s rail backbone is broken.
Former provincial transport minister Robin Carlisle penned an opinion piece in the Cape Argus almost exactly 11 years ago – 27 July 2010 – warning that lack of investment in Metrorail would lead to its collapse. This, said Carlisle, would “take the whole public transport system down with it”. He has been proved right. At the time, he stated Metrorail was carrying almost half of Cape Town’s commuters on less than 60% of the train sets it requires. “We need at least 40 additional train sets to provide decent passenger rail service,” he wrote.
Metrorail spokesperson Riana Scott says it currently operates 20 sets. This is half the number of additional train sets Carlisle deemed necessary 11 years ago.
Attempts to fix the City’s public transport backbone
In late 2012, the City’s newly formed transport authority, Transport Cape Town (TCT) initiated an agreement with Prasa CEO Lucky Montana to jointly invest in Cape Town’s rail infrastructure. Plans included a new line to Blue Downs, a line to Atlantis, a rail link to the Cape Town International Airport, and transfer of PRASA-owned land along rail reserves to enable the City to create housing and hard boundaries to prevent land encroachment. But how PRASA was looted and left for scrap under Montana has been well documented and very little came of this agreement.
The Metrorail Central line beyond Langa, which would service Nyanga, Philippi, Mitchell’s Plain, and Khayelitsha, has not operated since 2019 due to vandalism, theft and crime. Informal settlements have since been established on the line and reinstating the service will cost R1,2bn, says Scott. She said the rail service to Eerste Rivier and Strand has also been closed after infrastructure was stripped during the hard lockdown.
But beyond Prasa’s failures, Cape Town’s public transport vulnerability is linked to its failure to overcome its apartheid spatial planning legacy, and its MyCiti N2 Express service to Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain has not operated since April 2019 despite its commitments that year to have it reinstated by September 2019. Operations ceased following disputes by N2 Express shareholders, which include CODETA.
Former City mayco member for transport, Brett Herron, who in November 2018 resigned and then joined former mayor Patricia de Lille’s new GOOD party, said the national Land Transport Act allows for devolution of public transport management to municipalities.
Herron said when the TCT was established, the City started working on the transfer of Golden Arrow, which is regulated by province, to City management in order to integrate it with MyCiTi to avoid parallel or duplicate public transport services.
When the TCT became the Transport and Urban Development Authority (TDA) in January 2017, discussions were alsoinitiated with Metrorail’s mother body, PRASA, for the City to manage the rail and signalling infrastructure. He said Metrorail would provide a train service, in much the same way as the MyCiti where the City owns the roads and contracts vehicle operating companies to operate the buses. Herron said after negotiations stalled, an intergovernmental dispute with former transport minister Dipuo Peters was declared. Shortly before his resignation, she agreed to the City taking over regulation and contracting of the Golden Arrow service. Rail, he said, was still under discussion.
He said the problem is that we’ve had six national transport ministers in eight years and four provincial transport MECs since 2011. The devolution rail was always a stumbling block because the conversation had to restart every time we had a new minister.
Despite previous work, executive mayor Dan Plato says in 2019 the City began “the lengthy process of understanding the impact of devolving the rail function from PRASA in a phased and financially responsible manner to the City of Cape Town”.
But unlike the earlier model where the City would take care of the rail infrastructure and contract Metrorail to run the trains, Plato said the City would operate the service through a concession company.
He said a funding for a “high-level business plan” for this was turned down by National Treasury, who deemed it wasteful expenditure. This, he said, forced the City “to abandon the very critical exercise”. The City has petitioned the national ministers of transport and finance, and the President, for permission to relaunch the study but “to date, we have not received a response”.
Transport problem is a housing problem
Jennings and Wilkins, who is managing director of Open Streets Cape Town, both state that Cape Town’s public transport problem is inextricably linked to its failure to break apartheid spatial planning barriers. If poor and working class people were not confined to the city’s margins and forced to travel tens of kilometres to work close to the city centre, we wouldn’t be so reliant on minibus taxis, buses and rail. Wilkins suggests if people were housed closer to work, they could cycle or even walk to work and school if public transport grinds to a halt.
Jennings said the City’s inability to overcome apartheid planning means a mass of people move from peripheries to the inner city in the morning, and back again in the evening, with very little movement in between. This “tidal movement” required a large public transport fleet which then runs largely empty during the middle of the day, which makes it commercially unviable. This, said Jennings, was part of why the continued rollout of the MyCiti bus service had stalled. This was where Minibus taxis, because they were privately owned and relatively unrestricted, had the flexibility to move to where there was high demand, as profit, rather than the needs of passengers, were their priority.
The TDA was established precisely to incorporate housing, transport, and spatial planning into one authority. Despite progressive integrated policy development and catalytic spatial planning interventions, the TDA lasted just two years. The TDA was supported by former executive mayor Patricia de Lille, but when she clashed with the DA and resigned as mayor in October 2018, the TDA was disbanded by incoming executive mayor Dan Plato at his first council meeting of November 2018.
The transport authority was returned to being a directorate. It is a department without political leadership. It has not had a mayoral committee member since Felicity Purchase was appointed Speaker in March this year. Plato is acting mayco member for transport until a new appointment is made. Reasons for not having appointed a new mayco member for transport were not given.
Solutions to Cape Town’s public transport crisis have been developed for decades, but unless there is political leadership and implementation, Carlisle’s words penned in 2010 will remain prophetic: “Greater Cape Town will become an urban sprawl, its transport arteries clogged and congested; its atmosphere even more polluted; its economy stagnating and its apartheid configuration forever institutionalised.”
Anele Ndamazi, who works asa cleaner at a takeaway in the city centre, used to walk to the Heathfield train station on the central line and ride the train to town. When the central line stopped operating in 2019, he reverted to using minibus taxis. Ndamazi said taxis stopped operating
in his area when the violence flared up this past month and so he walks two kilometres to Manenberg and waits up 30 minutes or more to board a Golden Arrow bus which winds its way through Athlone before arriving in the city centre.
“If you are chasing 11am you must get out at 8am to get to the bus stop and travel the Western Cape just to get to town.”
He says the lack of reliable transport means he sometimes up to two hours late for work and has his hourly wages deducted.
“The taxis are ruling our transport system. These motherf***ers…they can’t talk to resolve their issues, they shoot each other instead,” said Ndamazi.
“We are trying to put food on the table, imagine, trying to survive and you die in taxi violence.” [...]
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