Mouille Point beach will be monitored for sewage after a resident complained about a raw sewage leak from the Mouille Point lighthouse pipe Wednesday last week.
Michael Broomberg said the smell carried all the way past the area towards Granger Bay.
“From a safety standpoint, this is detrimental to all living creatures in and out of our water,” he said.
“If you look at the buildings along Mouille Point and calculate the amount of toilets in each building, flushing at least four times a minute, 24/7 that might put it in perspective for our city planning department. The pump station can definitely not handle that kind of onslaught,” he said.
Following a sewage spill on Clifton 1st beach in 2018, a senior professor and leader of the Environmental and Nano Science Research group at the University of the Western Cape, Professor Leslie Petrik, said the City disposed of raw sewage volumes of 28.4 million litres a day from the Green Point marine outfall, 2.4 million litres a day via the Camps Bay outfall and 5.7 million litres a day from the Hout Bay Marine outfall.
She said raw sewage had an extremely high microbial load which could cause diseases and a very large number of chemicals. She said the microbes of the chemicals in sewage were not healthy for either humans or aquatic organisms.
Professor Petrik said the whole Atlantic Seaboard was enormously contaminated and the damage was being done continuously.
She said the City had shown no intention of stopping the millions of litres of untreated sewage going out to sea.
“The impact on our marine and coastal environment can only get worse as the discharge volumes grow continuously as the city grows,”she said.
Responding to the latest leak, the City’s manager for Coastal Management,Gregg Oelofse, said the officials had conducted a site inspection and no evidence of any ongoing sewage discharge was found.
“This is a highwave energy section of the coast and any discharge that may have occurred will be rapidly dissipated as a consequence. Please note that this is not a recreational area, as such, we do not expect any bathers in the water. Be as it may, the City will continue to monitor the area,” he said.