Dear Patricia de Lille, Mayor of Cape Town
As the head
of what your Democratic Alliance party claims to be the most efficient
municipality in the country can you please, please stop your Council wasting
more money on a rubbish dump that was closed 30 years ago?
The cost so far
this year could exceeded R1-million or even reach R1 500 000 before the
year is over.
Don’t blame
me if I haven’t got my figures spot on because ever since I began my expose`of
this scandal Councillor Johan van der Merwe, your Mayoral Committee member in
charge of Environmental Planning has not been very forthcoming about the cost
and exactly what is being done to maintain this site at Witsands next to a
popular surfing beach not far from Cape Point.
I have had
to drag information out of him bit by bit. At one stage he told me my figures
were not correct but he didn’t give me the right ones.
Now my
questions and the posts I have written about what is going on at this 19 ha sand dune covered
area have clearly got too hot and embarrassing for your Council.
How else can
you explain why Van der Merwe has now clammed up and refuses to answer any more
of my questions? I’m not surprised that he doesn’t want more publicity because this is a shocking
waste of ratepayer’s money made worse because it is taking place not far from
the townships of Masiphumelele and Ocean View where the residents so badly need
funds to upgrade facilities.
In March
this year he told me that managing this site to ensure that what is left of the
rubbish under the sand - plastic, bottles and other biodegradable material –
doesn’t get washed into the sea by streams that develop in the winter rainfall
season, has cost R500 000 a year for the last 10.
He added
that “more than 60%” of the amount spent had gone to “the employment of
unskilled labour.” This would have meant that the poor in the area would have
benefited by a massive R3-million over the period, a figure that I would
dispute as ‘Unbelievable.’ But I am
happy to apologise if your Council can give me some kind of reasonable proof
that this actually happened.
I have been
going to Witsands regularly over the last few years and this year your Council
has gone berserk with its spending there as if money is no object.
Since
February hired heavy earth moving equipment consisting of a huge tracked
bulldozer; an excavator and two dumper trucks was brought in on two occasions. They
spent several weeks on the site moving the sand around. And if the job had been
done properly the first time this equipment would not have been needed again just
a couple of months later.
These
machines don’t come cheap and at a rough guess R700 000 has already been
spent hiring them. To this must be added another R400 000 for the maze of
nets that have been put up in an effort to keep the sand in place in a very
wind swept area.
The
disregard for the way our money is being thrown away was graphically
illustrated when a lone excavator recently arrived on a Monday to deepen the
stream that had started running into the sea on the one edge of the site.
It stood
idle until Thursday, was used on that and the following day, and remained
parked at least until noon on the following Monday. When I questioned this Van
der Merwe told me that the City’s hire rate at Witsands for an excavator was R538
an hour and it didn’t cost anything for the first three days of the week as it
was delivered earlier than required.
On the site
I got a different more probably version and that was that the excavator could
not be used initially because the operator was waiting for the nets that went
across the stream and near it to be lifted so that it could get in.
I would
have expected your experts to have been able to predict where the stream would
run so the nets did not end up straddling it and then have to be removed.
The
deepening of the stream was definitely an absolute waste of money. Where the
work began it was about six meters wide and the water was a mere two or three
centimeters in the deepest parts.
The sand
was dug out in the middle of the stream to a depth of a meter and piled on the
side for about a kilometre. It evidently hadn’t occurred to the Council’s
experts that if you dig holes in waterlogged sand they close up almost
immediately and in this case, before the excavator left the site, the stream
had reverted back to its original depth.
 |
| After the stream was dug it went back to this which was no deeper than what it was before the excavator moved in |
Among my
very first questions to Van der Merwe I asked what effort had been made to
cover the land fill site with vegetation as this was internationally accepted
as the best and most cost effective way of stabilising coastal sand dunes.
He replied
that in this case it was “almost impossible to do” and in any event to “modify
this natural system” could not be done “without several authorisations.”
He didn’t
explain this and on several occasions since then he repeated that an
“Environmental Authorisation” would be needed to do this.
The
contract to erect the netting was given to Vula Environment Restoration a firm
of dune restoration specialists at a price of R200 000. It claims to have
stabilised dunes with indigenous grasses and to be able to produce vast
quantities of indigenous plant seeds.
“The reason
why the entire 19 ha has not been instantaneously vegetated is that there has
not been a detailed study of the viability of this and there in not an
Environment Authorisation in terms of the viability of the relevant legislation
to implement this,” Deon van Eeden the founder of Vula told me.
So for more
than 10 years your Council has been happily spending millions on this site
without bothering to do the “detailed study” he talking about or getting the
necessary authorisation that would allow the site to be covered in vegetation
in much the same way as the adjourning dunes, thus solving the problem forever
at minimum cost.
It now transpires that Van Eeden’s firm is
doing what I advocated six months ago even though that mysterious authorisation
has not been obtained.
“Natural
recolonisation by local vegetation has taken place in certain areas where seed
banks exist,” he told me last month. “This has been possible with the reduction
in sand movement created by the netting. Some limited planting of cuttings
taken from the area is taking place adjacent to existing vegetated areas where
sand has inundated areas that previously had vegetation.”
However
when asked him if he had solved the Environment Authorisation problem he again
repeated what had now become a council mantra: “Any proactive planting of the
historical mobile dune field will require an Environmental Authorisation.”
In March
Vula initially put up 5 km of netting on a 4ha ridge that was made by the earth
movers parallel to the sea. The nets were supposed to force the wind to drop
the sand on top of the landfill between the rows.
The first
two winter storms flattened or buried much of the netting and a large area of
rubbish was exposed. That was when the earth movers had to return in May to
dump tons more sand on the exposed areas.
 |
| Some of the first nets that were erected |
 |
| Nets put up more recently near the stream |
 |
| Left to nature this is how vegetation is growing on the dunes on the edge of the Council's sand pit next to the beach |
 |
| What the dunes in the Council's sand pit next to the beach look like after being shifted around and netted. |
After the Council gave Van Eeden
permission to answer my questions and he told me that his R200 000 vat
inclusive contract lasted until March 2017 he never made it clear that this was
purely to put up the nets and maintain them.
It was only by chance that Van
der Merwe disclosed recently that the nets themselves plus the poles to hold them
up were bought from two other different suppliers in December 2015 and June
2016 at cost of R101 000 and R111 400 excluding vat.
The depressing thing is that spending on nets
and putting them up is not yet over because Van der Merwe says that the City will
soon be advertising for quotes for “the remaining netting and maintenance work
required on the site.” He added that the cost of this would only be known once
the job had been awarded.
“It is the intention to net the entire dune
field before next summer and the ongoing management will include strategically
lifting some nets while leaving others to encourage sand to accumulate in areas
where it is needed.”
And who
knows, if they don’t do the job properly we might see the earth movers back.
Questions that Van der Merwe would
not answer:
·
Why is it that after spending R500 000 annually
on the site for the last 10 years the Council has not yet got Environmental
Authorisation to enable vegetation to be planted on the entire 19 ha?
·
Why is planting taking place when there is no
Environmental Authorisation?
·
From whom and how it the necessary Environmental
Authorisation obtained if the Council wants to go ahead with vegetating the
whole of the site?
·
Was Vula’s price to put up nets on the 19 ha or
only the 4ha that was done in the first phase?
·
If it was only for the 4ha section how much will
it cost to do the rest of the area?
Regards,
Jon, a very concerned Cape
Town ratepayer.
See:City won't stop dumping your money;
Is cape-town wasting more money on a rubbish dump;
cape town's huge waste of money
See:City won't stop dumping your money;
Is cape-town wasting more money on a rubbish dump;
cape town's huge waste of money
P.S. My suggestion, which was clearly regarded as sacrilege,
was to plant fast growing Port Jackson Australia to cover coastal dunes, similar to the
ones at Witsands, in other parts of Cape
Town
It spread so quickly it got the alien tag so your Council would rather carry on squandering millions than plant this. Meanwhile a whole mountainside is covered with it
a few kilometers from Witsands and your Council is doing nothing to get rid of that. It is now flowering, so it won’t be long before millions more PortJackson
It spread so quickly it got the alien tag so your Council would rather carry on squandering millions than plant this. Meanwhile a whole mountainside is covered with it
a few kilometers from Witsands and your Council is doing nothing to get rid of that. It is now flowering, so it won’t be long before millions more Port
