The government may even face criminal charges {writer: Fanie Heyns }

A looming pollution crisis, more than half a century in the making, could hamstring economic growth and cause a plague of health problems.

The government is also facing the threat of criminal charges for allegedly failing to manage water resources, amid increasing alarm about acid mine drainage affecting a vast area from the Witwatersrand to the Mpumalanga province.

Environmentalists have warned that if the government and industry fail to act, within two years mine water as corrosive as battery acid will gush from Johannesburg’s Wemmer Pan and seep into the city’s streets and gardens.

“It is acutely toxic,” Mariette Liefferink, chief executive officer of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment (FSE), told the Sunday Times.

“It affects the soil and neural development of the foetus, which leads to mental retardation; it will cause cancer, cognitive problems and skin lesions.”

Criminal charges

Recently, Nicole Barlow, chairperson for the Environment & Conservation Association, said that years of engagement had failed to persuade the government to take action on water pollution.

Her association has decided to lay charges against Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica and President Jacob Zuma in their personal capacities, she told Business Day.

Barlow said that Sonjica had failed to prevent pollution of the Hartbeespoort Dam and other water resources, while President Zuma is the custodian of the Constitution and is ultimately accountable to the people of South Africa.

“We have to control mine drainage, sewage dumping, while Pelindaba [nuclear facility] regularly dumps nuclear waste into the Crocodile River. And they [the government] just don’t care,” she told Business Day.

“People shouldn’t be anywhere near the Hartbeespoort Dam, not buying property there, not sailing, not fishing, and not eating the fish.”

A short history of the disaster

The Chamber of Mines made a series of recommendations in a document to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in 1952 in an attempt to secure the quality of South Africa’s water resources.

In 1960, the Jordaan Commission warned about imminent problems concerning the increased levels of iron, sulphates as well as manganese.

Those recommendations did not receive any serious attention, and a lack of institutional memory and the changing of the political guards might have contributed to this lack of proactiveness by the government, said Liefferink.

In 1996, the JCI mining group made a proposal to manage the flooding of the Eastern and Western Basins. That document, the “Strategic Water Management Plan Report” or so-called “SWAMP Report”, was proposed at the Water forums of Wonderfonteinspruit. These proposals were largely ignored by the government.

In 2002, the Western Basin was flooded by acid mine water that transformed the Tweelopiespruit into a class-five toxic river.

The Robinson Lake became a radioactive dam with uranium levels of 40 000 above background or natural uranium levels, said Liefferink.

Between 2002 and 2005, untreated acid mine drainage flooded the Western Basin.

Threat to integrity of buildings

In all, 108 megalitres of polluted water, containing all the heavy metals (sulphate, uranium and manganese) are pumped by the Grootvlei mine into the Blesbokspruit daily without ever being treated. The Blesbokspruit is part of the Vaal Barrage River system and hosts the Marievale Bird Sanctuary, which is a wetland of international importance in terms of the Ramsar Convention.

The Central Basin is also currently being flooded by acid mine drainage at a tempo of 0.9 metres per day, and is 580m from decant, i.e. from the outflow of uncontrolled and untreated acid mine drainage. “When this happens, not only will river systems be damaged irreversibly, but it also compromises the integrity of buildings,” said Liefferink.

The Department of Water and Environmental Affairs issued a directive to charge DRDGold, Mintails and Rand Uranium with collective responsibility of cleaning up the acid mine drainage in the Western Basin.

Rand Uranium (46%) and Mintails (0.4%) accepted responsibility and has treated and pumped a total of 18 megalitres per day since 2005, which is not nearly enough to curb the movement of heavy metals to the Vaal River and Limpopo catchment area.

The DRD mining group never accepted or acknowledge its guilt and responsibility in pumping or cleaning acid mine drainage over the past five years.

On 21 January 2010, there was decant of untreated and controlled acid mine drainage into the Tweelopiespruit due to the rain and an abundance of toxic and radioactive material that flowed and seeped into the Tweelopiespruit, which forms part of the Limpopo River catchment area and the Wonderfonteinspruit – which forms part of the Vaal River
catchment area.

Sonjica visited the polluted area in March 2010 and pledged R6.9 million for the treatment of the acid mine drainage – a trivial gesture, as it costs Rand Uranium R2.5m per month to treat 13 megalitres of water.

Four gold mines within the Eastern Rand contribute 35% of the salt in the Vaal Barrage, which compromises water quality.

Recently (in 2007), the Water Research Council researched the quality of water in the Vaal Barrage and concluded that only 21% of its content was not cytotoxic, or poisonous to human cells, said Liefferink in an interview with Service.

Mine action plan ignored by the government

The mining industry has made proposals for sustainable water resources and has suggested corrective measures to pump acid mine drainage from the Eastern, Central and Western Basins. Its technical and economic recovery plan, however, was not acceptable for the government, Liefferink told Service magazine.

When Minister Sonjica visited the polluted area and pledged the R6.9m in March, she promised that the government and the mining industry had entered into a public-private partnership to address the crisis of acid mine drainage.

When Liefferink and the FSE requested a copy, they finally received notice that no such partnership actually existed.

Liefferink spoke to the acting deputy director-general of Water and Environmental Affairs on 14 June 2010 and asked him if the government had a short-, medium- and long-term plan to address the looming pollution crisis of water resources in South Africa.

He acknowledged that no such plans had been finalised yet.

“If this crisis is not managed, water from the Central Basin will flow out into Central Johannesburg and will drastically affect human health, the economy and industrial quality,” warned Liefferink.

She added that the short-term, band-aid approach by the government is insufficient. Radical measures need to be taken.

A financial disaster

According to figures cited by the South African Institution of Civil Engineering, South Africa will need R500 billion over the next 10 years to fix
water infrastructure and install fresh capacity.

Jabu Maphalala, spokesperson for the Chamber of Mines, told the Sunday Times that the industry agreed in 1994 to put aside funds for rehabilitation. “However, mining has taken place for over 100 years, and left undesirable legacies, some of which emanate from abandoned, ownerless as well as derelict mines.

“Legislation now stresses the ‘polluter pays’ principle, but it is not easy to apply in dealing with this legacy because the original operators have long disappeared and the commodities produced have been consumed.”