Graveyard now also flooded

Many residents have been unable to take their extra rubbish to the Fochville waste transfer station next to the traffic department for years. Although the facility was neat and operational when it opened about a decade ago, a recycling project set up by the mines collapsed, allegedly due to political interference. As a result, the facility became so full that there was nowhere for people to throw their rubbish. The situation got worse over the years. Since long before the Covid-19 pandemic, the people working inside are not municipal employees or contractors but opportunists hoping to make money from recycling. As there is no control over what happens at the facility, some have started asking residents who want to dump their rubbish there for bribes. Others even allegedly sell drugs from the facility.
Many residents are wary of entering the facility, opting rather to offload their waste on the way to the facility than dump it in their neighbourhoods. So much rubbish has accumulated on the way to the transfer station that it blocks a manhole at the corner of the Munt Street extension below the traffic department. Even when it was open, this manhole often leaked, and the municipality usually took weeks to fix the problem.
For the past two years, at least, sewage from this manhole has been streaming down the road towards the transfer station. Some of it even dams up between pockets of rubbish.
This week, the problem got even worse. A resident whose loved ones are buried in the old graveyard next to the traffic department complained that the cemetery and some graves were also now flooded with sewage.
“Two of my relatives are buried there. You cannot walk there because the whole graveyard is flooded with sewage. You have to step on one grave to get to another.
“We cannot allow this to continue,” lamented the upset resident, Mr Neels Naude.
The Herald asked the Merafong City Municipality about the problem on Tuesday. However, their answer shows they are still far from accepting responsibility for the isues or trying to address them.
“The municipality is struggling to gain access and clear the blockage because of solid waste dumped around the area from the activities happening at the transfer station. The community is urged not to dump waste all over the place,” said the municipality’s acting manager of marketing and communication, Ms Nomonde Mahube.