Western Cape municipality ignores water tests

Despite being seen as the best run province in the country, 18 of the Western Cape’s 25 municipalities fail to consistently deliver clean drinking water, according to publicly available data from the national department of water & sanitation.

Still, the provincial government announced a clean audit across all departments this week, and received the score in an independent report by Ratings Afrika.

The situation has deteriorated over the past five years when 14 of the municipalities failed to provide drinking water that met minimum quality standards. The worst offender, since 2018, is the Klein Karoo municipality of Kannaland.

Kannaland municipality, which includes the towns of Ladismith, Zoar, Calitzdorp and Van Wyksdorp, is governed by the Independent Civic Organisation of SA (Icosa). Icosa has never had an outright majority, and has mainly been in coalition with the ANC since 2011. For a while in 2018 an ANC-DA coalition squeezed Icosa into a minority on the seven-seat council.

The data shows the municipality not only fails to consistently provide clean water, but also doesn’t  tes the water for various health indicators.

The municipality hadn't responded to queries at the time of publication.

Water health indicators

There are six indicators supplied by the municipality that are meant to be regularly analysed and the results uploaded to the DWS integrated regulatory information system.

The Kannaland municipality analyses only one of the indicators — microbiological contamination — that has a direct impact on human health. The “Acute Health: microbiological” indicator measures faecal bacteria such as E coli in the water. Faecal bacteria occur naturally in the gut but when ingested can be fatal in young children and people with compromised immune systems.

The amount of E coli, measured in colony forming units or coliforms, should be undetectable in a 100ml sample of drinking water, and the total number of coliforms of all faecal bacteria should be less than 10. The Kannaland municipality has met this quality requirement in just 75% of its samples this year. According to the DWS the minimum requirement is 97%.

The 75% figure for faecal bacteria is an average across Kannaland’s four municipal drinking water distribution systems in Ladismith, Zoar, Calitzdorp and Van Wyksdorp. While the water treatment works at Ladismith meet the microbiological criteria 99.9% of the time (putting it in the “excellent” range for this indicator), Kannaland municipality has met the minimum standard for faecal bacteria in the town of Zoar just 53% of the time. The Calitzdorp water treatment works met the microbiological standard 70% of the time, while the success rate at the Van Wyksdorp water treatment works is 88%.

Other health indicators ignored

In terms of faecal bacteria, Kannaland water is listed as “bad”. It doesn’t test for two other health indicators — for chemicals with acute (short term, or immediate) health impacts, and chemicals with chronic (long term) health impacts. Neither does it test for aesthetic (colour and smell), operational, or disinfectant indicators.

The water department’s website reflects the percentage for all these five indicators as zero. Confirmation that no testing (which is mandatory) is done can be seen on the department’s national water services knowledge system.

Its data on drinking water quality goes back to 2018, and reflects a deterioration over the past five years. The municipality as a whole achieved 94% for microbiological indicators in 2018, though this still falls into the department’s “bad” bracket, below 95%. None of the other health related tests were reported for the past five years.

Boil before use

“The drinking water is bad,” said Enrico Hardie, who runs a confectionery business in Zoar, adding that the water became so discoloured during summer that it resembled a cup of coffee. “No-one drinks that, unless maybe you boil it first.”

Often there is no water in the taps towards the end of summer.

Though Hardie also worked in the health sector, he said he didn’t see “hundreds of cases of diarrhoea” as one might expect, but added that because the water had been untrustworthy for so many years, people were generally boiling it before use.

Hardie said an environmental expert was appointed by the provincial government to consult with the municipality. “I saw him last year at a community meeting. He said they were going to start working on the water purification.”

Questions about efforts to improve water quality were sent to the Premier’s office, but no response had been received at the time of publication.

Blue Drop assessment

Despite the watger department’s system showing no analyses for chemical compliance, the Blue Drop Watch Report 2023, which investigated 151 of SA’s 1,186 water supply systems, investigated the Ladismith system and determined chemical compliance was greater than 99.9%. It noted microbiological compliance, at 92.3%, was below the minimum threshold and posed “a significant risk for community health”.

Water & sanitation minister Senzo Mchunu said the Blue Drop Watch Report, released 6 June, is a “technical perspective” ahead of the full Blue Drop Report and it didn’t investigate the water supply for Calitzdorp, Zoar or Van Wyksdorp.

In his foreword to the Blue Drop Watch Report, Mchunu states the full Blue Drop Report would be released in “mid-July”. It has yet to be released.

Water & sanitation spokesperson Wisane Mavasa said a Western Cape interdepartmental task team has been meeting with the Kannaland municipality and monitoring water quality on a quarterly basis. The most recent meeting was on Monday.

Mavasa said Kannaland wasn’t compliant with legislation and  the provincial government had seconded a chief engineer to Kannaland for four months. Though engineers from the department of co-operative governance & traditional affairs and the Municipal Infrastructure Support Agency were assisting, it was not sustainable if there was “no assistance within the municipality”.

He said the department met senior municipal management in April and alerted them that they had no qualified process controllers, and warned departmental funding would be cut if the situation persisted.

The department has implemented measures to manage Kannaland’s water and sanitation operations and provide an action plan to be tabled at the task team meetings.

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