‘Looming sewage catastrophe'

Effluent pumped into waterways poses ‘real danger’ to health, warns Dr Jo Barnes, dubbed the Erin Brockovich of South Africa

- Sue Segar

IN BETWEEN WORRYING ABOUT ESKOM, junk status and David Mabuza, spare a thought for just one more thing: the state of the country’s rivers. In a word, it’s dire. South Africa’s rivers are being polluted on a massive scale, with billions of litres of sewage discharged into the rivers every day. This is largely due to the fact that close to 80% of the 825 municipal sewerage treatment works are dysfunctional and have been for a long time.

One person who’s been trying to do something about this for years is Dr Jo Barnes, an award-winning researcher into water pollution, sanitation and water-related diseases. For more than 20 years, she has been trying to get municipal and other authorities to take note of the growing crisis affecting our rivers and the potential public health risk this poses. But the former senior lecturer in Community Health at Stellenbosch University – now retired but still working as a water consultant – has had little luck and, through the years, has even faced active measures to shut her up.

“The municipalities, the City [of Cape Town], the Department of Water Affairs – they’ve all tried to shut me up, but I’m an obstinate old bird,” Barnes told Noseweek, when we met in Somerset West, where she lives with a Maine Coon cat called Megabyte and a garden full of birds and squirrels. It was an unbearably hot day, even in the air-conditioning of Somerset West’s Lord Charles Hotel, where we met. We drank endless glasses of iced water. Asked to comment on the state of the country’s rivers, Barnes replied: “It’s sewage, sewage and sewage.

“I don’t have words to tell you how bad it is. Sewage is an unromantic and unpopular topic but it’s presenting a very real danger. People in the towns and cities don’t realise this, as it is taken away by the rivers.