Sewerage floods home

The recent heavy rains and floods left many Pretorians concerned about flooding and a couple from the east of Pretoria battling knee-deep in water trying in vain to prevent a river of sewage from flooding into their home. Karim Khoja and his wife bought their house without knowing that three separate sewage pipelines were connected with the storm water pipeline system and that the juncture of these was on their property.

“Up to now, we have experienced no less than six floods of storm water mingled with human waste. At the end of February’s flooding, I bought 30 sandbags to try and curb the water flow. Monday night, however, was the worst flooding ever that we have experienced. The water burst out of the manhole in the corner of our yard. In no time it flooded the back garden, then the swimming pool and eventually it was an unstoppable flow, rushing straight to our sitting room’s backdoor. This was at around 19:00. With the help of my wife and neighbours, we stacked some 30 sandbags till 23:00 against the door, but the flood was so strong that it still entered my house. With brooms we tried to redirect the water to a side gate of my property so that it could flow into the street,” Khoja said.

Pieter van Wyk, a neighbour of the Khoja’s, managed to get city planning diagrams showing how the sewage pipeline from Patrys Avenue over Lion Street joins up with a sewerage pipeline of Squirrel Lane. “I too experienced more than one flood. A few years back a new development was built close to us. As far as I can ascertain, there are only three of us whose houses are linked up with the Squirrel Lane sewerage pipeline. Yet, when there is a flood and you open up the sewerage pipeline’s eyes, you can hear a river rushing past below you. With only three houses joined, no sewerage system should sound like that. On such occasions we also find that our toilets do not flush as they should. It seems that my neighbour got the short end of the stick when he brought this property. It is just his bad luck that the junction of three pipelines happens to be on his property. As far as I understand, with the law regarding the sale of properties, defects on a property such as this one should have been disclosed with the change of ownership,” Van Wyk said.

Bronwynn Engelbrecht, a municipal council member of the ward, remarked that when Khoja’s house was built by a previous owner, the builder took a shortcut and joined the sewerage and storm water drains. “The problem starts with builders who do not follow the laws of the Tshwane metro. It has, unfortunately, now become the problem of the city to manage and correct. The metro must be in a position to assist with such emergency matters.” She pointed out that to enable basic service delivery, it was critical that the infrastructure department had sufficient funds available to allow for daily operational expenses and to accommodate emergency infrastructure expenditure.

“The metro’s financial year ends on 30 June, which means there are still four months in which money needs to be available to enable service delivery to the community In spite of this, the budget of the infrastructure department has been reduced by R7m. This means that for the remaining four months, there is no money available to assist residents with any emergency work,” she said. She added that she had communicated with the city manager about this crisis but to date had received no reply or commitment for assistance.

“It is a disgrace that residents are left in such a predicament because the metro has run out of money – it is not acceptable for such a large metro to be cutting funding on a critical department in terms of service delivery,” she commented. She also remarked on the health hazard the situation posed, since there is a serious risk of E Coli spreading to neighbours, volunteers and the community who assist the family daily by sweeping the effluent from his back garden into the front street to join up with another drainage system.

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