WATER shortages and rumours of rationing have brought home the sobering fact that that there is not enough clean fresh water to sustain Durban’s ever-growing population, and according to Lee D’Eathe of the Palmiet River Watch, the very source of this precious resource is very badly polluted.
Water quality and river health assessments undertaken again by the Palmiet River Watch in the first quarter of 2016 confirm this.
In his quest to improve the environment, D’Eathe, who initiated and champions the action-orientated environmental river watch organisation, presented the river health assessments and human waste (E.coli count) assessments at the Palmiet River rehabilitation project workshop along with the key problems which have been included in the recently distributed action plan.
The river watch findings were also shared with Reshnee Lalla, KwaZulu-Natal regional co-ordinator for invasive species programme SA National Biodiversity Institute, and her team, who spent a morning at the Palmiet Nature Reserve seeing first-hand how river health assessments were done.
D’Eathe said eThekwini’s published unicity river quality index maps that show much of the Palmiet River as ‘acceptable’ are misleading since they are based on a chemical analysis with no regard to sustaining life of aquatic creatures.
“The miniSASS biological assessment undertaken by the Palmiet River Watch takes the environment into account; and the ‘poor’ and ‘very poor’ results indicate a highly modified and polluted environment, due largely to sewage and industrial trade effluent contamination, as well as pollution from the Wyebank municipal waste disposal site.
“The river health gets less poor at the Palmiet Nature Reserve, only to plummet to ‘very poor’ again in the Quarry Road informal settlement.”
He added that the many very high E.coli count results along the 23 kilometres of river confirm sewage as the main cause of river water pollution, which ought to have been addressed pro-actively.
”This along with other factors contribute to polluting the water quality and destroying the riverine habitats.”
Anyone who wishes to be involved in Palmiet River rehabilitation can contact D’Eathe on 083 461 5964 or e-mail businessunusuallee@gmail.com.
