Delta Park trampled
DELTA PARK – A resident raises concern of what impact the masses taking part in the parkrun will have on the park itself.
Shirley Tebbutt – Delta Park Users Group writes:
In answer to the article [A run for the masses, Northcliff Melville Times week ending 17th October].
The article starts with the sentence ‘Soon every person and dog in Randburg will be run around Delta Park every Saturday morning’.
This sounds wonderful but has anyone stopped to think what these hoards of people are doing to the fragile environment of the park?
There are hundreds of runners every Saturday and their feet not only kick up clouds of dust but they are damaging the dry and brittle grass.
Once the rains come all this will be muddy so their feet will damage the ground in a different way.
A lot of people run with their dogs but I have yet to see one person stopping to pick up their dog’s poos.
This in turn means that ‘someone’ has to pick it up to keep the park clean.
The faeces left there are a breeding ground for the tiny dung beetle spirocerca lupi and when their microscopic eggs are sniffed up by another dog, the eggs hatch in the oesophagus where it makes a hard chrysalis which eventually prevents the dog from swallowing and it has to be put down. The cases of this terrible worm are rapidly increasing.
The number of cars trying to park in the park far exceeds the existing capacity and has already necessitated ‘sacrificing’ the area of lawn just north of the old compound to try and ensure that the access road to the Delta Environmental Centre remains open to emergency vehicles, should they be needed. Situations such as medical emergency (like the runner who was possibly bitten by a rinkhals during an early parkrun), or the occasion that the fire brigade couldn’t get through to control a fire below Delta School due to the traffic chaos along the access road could easily happen again. They could also end tragically unless we control the number of vehicles in the park and also how and where they are parked.
The runners give nothing back to the park, they just come, use it and go away unaware that Delta Park Users have to pay people to pick up all the dog poos. We have had to put a thick chain across the one entrance at the Environment Centre into the actual park and lock it every Friday afternoon to prevent people from parking their cars inside the park.
What I would like is not to encourage more and more runners at Delta Park but to ask if a few hundred could go and do their Saturday run at another parkrun to take the pressure off our lovely park. I know a lot of people will not agree with me and I can expect a lot of negative comments and may ask ‘what about the cyclists?’
That is another issue that must be addressed and will be.
