When You Have A Beach Sewerage Problem With Tourists Arriving For The Christmas Holiday Season

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This year many of the main tourist beaches in Durban prior to the Christmas holiday season were closed due to high levels of E-Coli found in the water. Finding E-Coli in the water means there is raw sewerage floating in the water and normally this is pumped directly into the sea and has not gone through some water treatment farm first. Obviously they know where it is coming from and guaranteed it is being pumped directly into the sea and under certain tidal conditions this is a major health problem. They are not going to invest their budget into fixing this and they will rather lie and say there is no problem.

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Imagine having a court having to intervene in order to protect beach goers because the council would rather hide these details.

Durban is a beach tourist city and the beach is the main destination attraction for visitors travelling from the interior of the country. Myself I am not a beach nut so this does not affect me and would rather be swimming in my own pool at home knowing the water is clean and disease free.

The sea water should be excellent all year round and knowing the test results where those beaches are situated these reports are doctored or manipulated. How can South Beach and North Beach be acceptable when right next door Country Club and Thekweni Beach are more than double the readings. If you are an official you are going to say anything to get the tourists to swim and hope no one gets sick.

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An old map of the beaches in Durban which shows they are all next door to each other using the same body of water so how can beaches that are within 1km or 2km of each other have such different readings? The difference in the beach names was separated by piers so the exact same water. For those interested this map also shows how the beaches were segregated back then under Apartheid. I know the white beaches had shark nets, but cannot recall if the other beaches had any.

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A beach report from 4 days ago and miraculously all clear now and must be that the current has changed direction. I still would not trust the water readings no matter whist they are saying.

You would think knowing the beaches being the main attraction that the E-Coli problem would be top of the agenda to fix yet every year this is the same repeated story. Businesses lose customers who instead of having repeat family holidays which many families do for some reason travel elsewhere where they know the sea water is clean.

When I was based in the army on the Durban Bluff back in 1989 we had a sewerage farm close by because on hot humid days with the wind blowing in the right direction the stench was unbearable. Back then they never had a E-Coli problem that affected the beaches like it does today and I would suggest none of the facilities have been maintained or upgraded for the last 36 years and why this problem is an ongoing battle that happens with beaches being closed regularly many times a year.

The general pollution is another problem not only on the beaches each year the masses gather, but all over the country. I was watching an interviewer interview people on why they litter and the responses were unbelievable. The thought process you would never understand as they all believed it offered more opportunity for more jobs. If they clean up after themselves then they are doing the jobs of others and there would be no work for them. Quite an eye opener how an uneducated person thinks and this is their honest logic. This always puzzled me why people were littering and thought they had no standards which is obviously the case, but this explanation is more worrying.

When you throw in alcohol which they cannot handle at the best of times each year you are going to have a pollution disaster on your hands. You can provide the bins required ,but using their logic they will not use them. This is why you travel down the streets in any urban area where the locals live and the first thing you notice is rubbish everywhere and it is a cultural way of thinking. Education is the only solution so we are many decades away from ever fixing the pollution problems.

It is no wonder when we have heavy rainfall and the storm water drains empty the water and rubbish into the rivers they make their way to the sea. Back in 1989 I will never forget after severe flooding that lasted for around a week we being in the army spent two weeks cleaning the beaches. We removed dead cows, bodies that had been washed down the river from flooded cemeteries and tons of plastics. I never noticed if there was human feces at the time as the stench we were dealing with was that bad and could easily have been there.

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