Councillor says sewage problems are escalating daily
According to Cllr Meiring, the gravity of the situation was communicated to municipal leadership on multiple occasions by a number of people.
DA Councillor Bertie Meiring has been at ground zero for many sewage problems.
After consultation, he provided the following response for publication:
“The sewage problems are escalating day by day. One of the issues that seems very difficult to solve is the sewage overflowing in front of Mortimer Toyota going further up to KFC, further to the back of Spur then further to the back of HiFi Corporation. For the last few weeks it was overflowing at the back of Checkers as well.”
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According to Cllr Meiring, the gravity of the situation was communicated to municipal leadership on multiple occasions by a number of people.
Nothing has yet been done to rectify or mitigate these problems.
“This sewage problem is now an ongoing situation for more than a year. The municipality often replaces a collapsed pipe in Allen Street, just to discover another collapsed pipe in the same line.”
Cllr Meiring called it urgent, that the municipality addressed the whole system in that area and replaced infrastructure to ensure a long term solution was reached.
By patching the sewage lines, he said, the solution was only being postponed. Noting the health risks overflowing sewage could cause, Cllr Meiring said the image being painted of Newcastle was bad.
“Sewage overflows have become a norm in other areas of Newcastle. Often the residents complain of sewage flowing down the street or mainlines overflowing on their premises. Sometimes they can’t even get into their premises without stepping in the sewage.”
Many times, he continued, the blockages were cleared by the municipality only to have them reoccur the next day or later in the week.
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He also believed there was a lack of staff for this purpose. With these problems growing, Cllr Meiring decried how residents of Newcastle had to bear the consequences and how it had resulted in fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
“The municipality and governing party have to address the infrastructure urgently by budgeting for the necessary maintenance and upgrading where necessary. It is unacceptable that the rate-paying residents of Newcastle have to be exposed to such bad service delivery.”
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