At the State of the Gauteng City-Region Review 2013 held at Wits University recently researcher Kerry Bobbins presented on Acid Mine Drainage (AMD) and its governance.
The good news is that the private sector has put measures in place to keep AMD under control in the short term.
Acid Mine Drainage happens when acidic water from abandoned mines flow into spruits and fonteins, like the Montgomery and Braamfontein Spruit- two of the few waterways that flow through our area. ‘Mine voids’ are left below the earth’s surface where they fill with toxic fluids which can potentially contaminate our potable water sources and also seep through the ground on which we walk.
Acid Mine Drainage is one of the fallouts of the booming mining industry of the past century and while mine dust has been spoken about in length, the issue of AMD as harmful to the Gauteng City-Region’s development has not been as a topical issue as it should be, she suggested.
Bobbins’ paper was the second in the Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s (GCRO) occasional papers on mine drainage, the first from Professor Terence McCarthy of the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Geosciences.
Details: The GCRO has put together an interactive website that uses maps, graphs and diagrams to review the trends affecting people in the city-region. View it at www.gcro.ac.za/stateofgcr
