Sewerage Upgrades Fail to Stop Cradle of Humankind Pollution
Mogale City’s ongoing sewerage upgrades have failed to stop polluted water from reaching streams that drain into South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind, according to testing reported by GroundUp and carried by AllAfrica.
Water samples taken from the Blougat Spruit downstream of the Percy Stewart treatment plant were found to contain high levels of E. coli. The findings suggest that sewage-contaminated effluent continues to leave the works and enter a catchment connected to the World Heritage Site, despite reported investment in upgrading municipal wastewater infrastructure.
A World Heritage catchment under pressure
The Cradle of Humankind, proclaimed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, lies partly within the Mogale City Local Municipality on Gauteng’s West Rand. The site contains fossil-bearing caves including Sterkfontein and Maropeng, which have produced some of the oldest known hominin remains and form the basis of an interpretive complex that draws visitors from around the world.
The Blougat Spruit is among the small tributaries whose catchments overlap with the heritage area’s buffer zones. The Cradle’s position on the edge of the Witwatersrand mining belt and the West Rand’s growing urban footprint has long raised concerns about contamination of its streams from multiple sources, including failing municipal infrastructure.
Concerns over water quality
According to AllAfrica, citing GroundUp’s test results, the high E. coli readings downstream of the Percy Stewart plant indicate that water leaving the facility remains unsafe by environmental standards. Such bacteria are a standard marker of faecal contamination and are commonly used to judge whether treated wastewater is fit to be discharged into natural waterways.
The continued discharge into the Blougat Spruit adds to longstanding worries about the protection of a landscape whose significance rests both on its surface environment and on the fragile underground cave systems that have preserved the fossil record of early human ancestry.
Sources
This report was written from coverage published by the following news organisations. Follow the links for the original reporting.
