Fochville community cleans rubbish dump
The community has been cleaning this facility themselves for the past years.
Concerned residents of Fochville clubbed together to clean up the Fochville waste transfer station last week. According to one of the action’s organisers, Mr Corné van der Merwe, they had no choice but to take on the municipality’s work themselves.
“We did this for our own benefit and safety. The transfer station was in such a bad state that no-one could get in properly to dump their rubbish there anymore,” he says.
Several businesses and well as other residents clubbed together to hire a TLB to remove rubbish from the facility. Although they had planned for the work to be done in about eight hours, it ended up taking two days.
“We wanted to clean up the road to the transfer station as well, but this is just too expensive as it will take too long,” says Van der Merwe.
He added that although the residents involved in the clean-up campaign asked the Merafong City Local Municipality to do something about the sewage leaking toward the facility, an official told them that “it is only water,” despite the municipality acknowledging to the Herald on several occasions that they could not access the manhole from which the sewage was leaking due to so much rubbish being dumped on it.
The Herald had also published photos of the leaking manhole earlier. The community also discovered that the facility was not registered as a dumping site and that there was no budget allocated to sort it out.
Van der Merwe thanked everyone involved for assisting with the action.
“The Fochville transfer station is permitted by the Competent Authority and the cleaning up of the said facility will be done in due course,” Mr Temba Fezani from Merafong answered questions about the issue.
