Environmental organisations monitoring the oil spillage along the Umsunduzi River in Pietermaritzburg are concerned about the manner in which government has responded to the crisis which has left thousands of fish and other species dead.
Oil from the Willowton Group’s Oil factory allegedly ended up in nearby streams as well as the Umsunduzi and Umgeni rivers last week.
Ground Work spokesperson, Bobby Peek, says the incident has shown that government has no proper plan in place to deal such incidents.
“This is an ecological disaster because of a regulatory failure government has failed the people. Government doesn’t have systems to deal with an environmental disaster such as this. That’s the first thing. You need to recognise by opening up the water upstream and allowing mire water to flow is a type of dilution. But it’s not a solution. It just pushes the pollution further downstream and faster.”
Meanwhile, the Duzi Umgeni Conservation Trust’s Sanele Vilakazi, whose organisations is involved in monitoring the quality of water, says the toxins have killed all animals living downstream.
“It’s not painting a very pretty picture from the biological monitoring assessment test that we have conducted. Stretching from where the source of the contamination came from those tests looking further downstream it absolutely showed no life especially within the waters themselves. We have not expanded beyond that to look at the side and the banks of the river in terms of what is going on with the soil and the registration but it’s not looking good at the moment.”
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