Merafong Municipality neglects Fochville waste transfer station
For several years the community has had to clean up the facility themselves.
The Merafong City Local Municipality is again causing the road to the Fochville waste transfer station to be flooded.
The municipality has been neglecting this facility for years. According to information given by the municipality at that time, it was originally supposed to be a point where municipal rubbish trucks could pick up rubbish and take it to the Rooipoort rubbish dump near Blybank, which is the only official rubbish dump in the entire Merafong area.
Although the mines helped to establish a recycling project at the Fochville transfer station, it did not work, allegedly due to political interference. For more than the past ten years the facility, which is the only one where Fochville residents can dump their rubbish, has been a mess.
A group of community members recycle some of the rubbish while the rest is dumped in heaps in the terrain and next to the road leading to it. Residents cleaned the facility and the road to it in June after the municipality failed to help.
By July the municipality eventually opened a manhole from which sewage had been leaking down the road toward the transfer station for years. Unfortunately, sewage was again leaking from this same manhole this week.
So much sewage was leaking on October 3 that people working in the area dug a trench to try to channel it away from the road. So much sewage is, however, leaking at the site that it now floods the veld next to the road as well. Some of the sewage also streams into the Loopspruit.
“This is very unhealthy and we have to walk over it to get to our home at Kokosi every day,” a pedestrian remarked. The Herald took the issues to the municipality on Monday but did not receive a response.
