Roodeplaat Dam, seen here clogged with invasive water hyacinth, has been further polluted by raw sewage flowing from Tshwane's broken water treatment infrastructure.Farmer Theuns Vogel, 68, was hoping that his vegetable farm on the banks of the Apies River would be his pension.
Vogel was speaking to TimesLIVE a week after the SA Human Rights Commission heard submissions from desperate Tshwane residents about the near-collapse of the city's wastewater treatment infrastructure.Vogel, who has been farming in the area since 2003, is one of six farmers whose water is supplied directly from the Rooiwal plant.
An estimated 40 tankers also supply the residents of Hammanskraal who have been unable to drink their tap water for almost a decade.Dewatering excess sewage sludge is a critical part of the treatment process in which the water in the sludge is squeezed out in a belt press and filtered while the solid matter is fed into a hopper.Vogel claims that only three of the plant’s 10 belt presses are currently working and the raw sludge has merely been dumped into the river.
The city’s water pollution is also being felt at Roodeplaat Dam where a combination of raw sewage flowing into the dam from the Pienaars River and spreading invasive water hyacinths have all but made the dam unusable as either a water supply or for recreation.
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