“We spent our weekends on the Loch, skiing and boating,” he says. Residents owned various speed boats as water sport was king. The Loch Boat Club was the local gathering place for residents. People spent many hours socializing, especially on the spacious wooden river boat. Rand Water’s officials kept a watchful eye on water safety.
Some folks even rinsed their drinking glasses in the Loch’s water. The water was completely safe.
Another local community hub was the Barrage Hotel. Owner, Ken Cloutman, built up the complex that now has a shop and fuel station. It was always frequented by locals and weekenders. Saturday nights there were the popular ‘tiekiedraai’ and ‘kuier’. The hotel even had a front garden, with a boat jetty on the Rietspruit. Life was good!
Mike came to South Africa, after graduating at Liverpool University with a Degree in Chemistry. A British company, that had the contract to providing oxygen to Iscor’s Vanderbijlpark works, employed him. Many Loch residents worked at Iscor, Sasol and local industries. Some locals only had weekend homes on the Loch. During the week they lived on the Witwatersrand.
Mike invested in his future. He first rented a small place on the Loch before buying his own house in 1983, on the banks of the Rietspruit. After retirement in 2010, he built a new spacious home.
Nowadays the Loch Vaal is a hotspot of raw sewage spills. At the time of our interview, last Friday, he had spent the week getting to the root of the latest sewage spill.
“It’s coming from the Rietspruit wastewater treatment works. They have re-started operations but sadly the systems are not working properly,” he says.
He has been an active member of SAVE’s specialist committee on the Vaal Barrage’s wastewater pollution, since the mid-2000s. Committee members regularly meet with Emfuleni’s management, the Department of Water and Sanitation, and political leaders. For years they have been sitting in on the ‘plan of action’ meetings.
Mike first reported for SAVE duty in the second decade, after South Africa’s political transition. The Loch then posed a threat to the local social-cological system. Barrage residents, through the River Property Association, started up SAVE as a NGO in the 1990s to halt SASOL’s plans to start coal mining at Cloudy Creek. Since then, SAVE has been a watch dog, with lots of support from local residents.
As technical expert, Mike has spent much time in meetings with planners. There was, he recalls, an action in the mid-2000s to start a comprehensive regional wastewater treatment works, on the western side of the N1. The plans were soon shelved.
From an environmental health, safety and security perspective there were too many risks. The megaproject would have replaced the then troubled treatment works of Sebokeng, Rietspruit and Leeuwkuil.
“Sometimes I wish we had opted for that solution,” he says. It was just too expensive. Does Mike have any solutions to the crisis? He knows that
carrying out a wastewater treatment operation is complex, especially Emfuleni’s Metsi, a Lekoa water services authority.
It requires a staff of well-trained workers, managers and planners. There needs to be consistency in operations, with clear management plans for maintenance and upgrading the three wastewater plants, interconnected by more than 2000km’s of pipelines and 40 pump stations. One option would be to bring in the private sector to take charge of certain operations. It could take a load off the shoulders of Emfuleni.
The problem is although Emfuleni’s ratepayers are billed for monthly payments, wastewater services are not metered, as is the case with water and
electricity services. Another problem is securing payment from Emfuleni for services rendered, once a private operator steps in. Mike singles out methane gas.
It if could be generated by the plants, as energy source for local domestic consumers, there would be entrepreneurial opportunities. Civil society consumers would also be quick to respond if their gas supplies cut out. It could be the perfect canary in a coal mine – alerting authorities to potential protests. At present, life on the Loch is far from its former glory. However, there is still a strong local sense of solidarity. NWU’s CuDyWat research group noticed this while doing interviews at the Loch Vaal in 2019. Friends and neighbours constantly communicate. They spend time visiting,
eating together and even going on the Loch to have the customary sundowners. After all they are all water people.
* About the author: Johann Tempelhoff, extraordinary professor at North- West University, is an environmental historian, specializing in water.
