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The government did the right thing by releasing a report on acid mine drainage (AMD) last week that referred to the water pollution problem in the mine voids of the Witwatersrand as a “crisis”.
Now it is the turn of gold mining firms to peer beyond self-interest and open up their own databases.
By stalling the release of detailed information on the interconnectedness of mines below the Witwatersrand, the mining houses are robbing South Africa of optimal solutions to treat AMD and simultaneously separate and preserve vast supplies of clean underground water.
They are also fostering uncertainty regarding the projected dates for decant of underground water at the surface of the central Wits basin.
In 2007, mining groups including DRDGold contracted Western Utilities Corporation (WUC), a subsidiary of London-listed Watermark Global, to find a suitable technology to treat contaminated AMD water to drinking standards, to find users for the reclaimed water and to secure funding.
WUC kickstarted an environmental impact assessment process said to have cost about R75 million. This involved, in part, a project to collate research on the interconnection between mines arising from faults and dykes.
The company is understood to have recovered hundreds of old mine maps from various government offices, and performed detailed work to digitise the map and work out a profile of the mine void.
But the work has never been released.
As a result, mining firms have access to more detailed information about where acid water is originating within the underground system than the scientists, researchers and concerned citizens. Last week’s report on AMD made an oblique reference to this: it noted there were “reports produced for private clients by consulting companies (these reports are generally not in the public domain but could also be consulted by interacting with the concerned institutions/companies). Inclusion of information from these privileged and confidential documents in this report was precluded by the timeframe.”
WUC has refused to release the information so as not to compromise its competitiveness. It would not comment yesterday. 
The reports would have to be peer-reviewed if released, but they might provide the basis to undertake the kind of investigations that the state-commissioned AMD report points out are lacking: identifying the status of the geohydrological regime, the extent of contamination, preferential pathways and predicting long-term migration. The government report also points out that mining companies are currently providing the state with “limited” information on the volumes of water used and wastewater they generate, although it is likely they own “much more accurate and detailed” data of the volumes.
What we know about the WUC report is that it projected decant of the central basin around mid-2012. The government report, however, refers to information from Central Rand Gold that forecasts decant for March 2013.
Either way, we can’t be sure sensible decisions are being made when different models produce outcomes that disagree.
By releasing its information, the WUC would help to eradicate confusion and lessen the panic that National Planning Minister Trevor Manuel is urging against.
But that would be throwing away the bargaining chip it still holds for its own commercial solution. And that is probably of bigger concern to a private firm than preserving supplies of clean water. – Ingi Salgado
Source: IOL
Cape Town – Capetonians should brace themselves for another heatwave coupled with strong south-easterly winds that pose a serious fire risk, the city council warned on Monday.
It said the weather services had forecast soaring temperatures for the rest of the week after the mercury was expected to hit 37°C on Monday.
The City’s Disaster Risk Management Centre warned the public to keep hydrated, avoid sun exposure and stay indoors during the hottest hours of the day.
“Tourists visiting Cape Town who are not acclimatised to the heat are asked to take extra precautions.
“They could suffer from swelling of the ankles, inflammation of the skin, sharp pains due to loss of water, dizziness, nausea, diarrhoea and fainting,” it added.
The centre urged motorists not to throw cigarette butts from their car windows as this was a frequent cause of runaway fires in hot windy conditions.
Fires would not be allowed on the fringes of Table Mountain, except in specially demarcated areas.
The public was asked to stay clear of areas where helicopters fighting blazes fill their heli-buckets because the large crowds that often converge to watch the aircraft could distract the pilots.
“The heli-buckets are very difficult manoeuvre and pilots must concentrate on the task at hand without distractions from curious onlookers.”
The city reminded Capetonians that they should report any emergency to 107, if ringing from a landline, or 021 480 7700 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 021 480 7700 end_of_the_skype_highlighting from a mobile phone.
- SAPA
Source: News24
It’s possible to save water in summer without having to watch your beloved garden shrivel in the heat. Greywater doesn’t sound appealing, but it helps keep things green.
What is greywater?
Greywater, sometimes known by the equally unromantic name of ‘sullage’, is used water that contains some impurities but isn’t heavily polluted. As you might expect, it’s no longer suitable for drinking, but it still has plenty of use left in it.
Household greywater includes water that you’ve used to wash yourself (i.e. from the bath, shower or basin), or do the laundry.
Re-using greywater significantly reduces the amount of fresh water needed for your household, and also the amount of waste water entering the sewerage system.
Great for the garden
Greywater can be safely re-used to irrigate plants, so don’t hesitate to use it on your garden. It contains low concentrations of soap, which actually suits most garden plants.
The contaminants in greywater break down quickly when exposed to the elements, and the plant roots and soil organisms in your garden speed up this process.
The following tips can help make ‘greywatering’ safe and effective:
- For the most part, gardens thrive on greywater, but it’s still a good idea to switch to fresh water every now and then – say once a week.
- Use greywater on established plants, not seedlings.
- Spread greywater over a wide area – don’t always use it on the same section of your garden.
- Don’t re-use dishwater. It’s also sometimes included in the definition of ‘greywater’, but it’s not suitable for recycling in this way. It contains chemicals that might damage plants, and food residues that can cause unwanted bacterial growth.
- Try to use greywater within 24 hours, or the rising bacteria count will start to cause odour. You can keep it a few days longer, but then you’ll need to treat it by adding about half a tablespoon of bleach per litre – and that, of course, adds to the chemical load.
- Don’t let children or pets play with or drink greywater.
- Improve the quality of your greywater at source by using less soap, cosmetics and laundry detergent.
Other ways to go grey
In addition to re-using greywater in the garden, you can also use it to flush the toilet. Every time you do, you save about 12 litres* of fresh water – the amount used for a regular flush mechanism.
Again, don’t go grey exclusively. Use the regular flush mechanism once a day – and certainly for faecal matter. Remember the timeless maxim:
When it’s yellow, let it mellow,
When it’s brown, flush it down!
Only put greywater into the toilet bowl, not the tank, as it can damage the flushing mechanism.
You can also use greywater for sluicing down paved surfaces outdoors – but make sure it doesn’t run into your neighbour’s property or the street.
André Janse van Vuuren | Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:08
THE government has budgeted R225m over the next two years to design and build an acid mine water treatment facility in the Vaal water management area. In the 2011 budget tabled by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan on Wednesday, the amount allocated for the department of water affairs’ sector management programme was increased by 15.3% per year for the next three years – from R447m in 2010/11 to R685m in 2013/14. “The spending focus over the medium term will be on designing and building the acid mine drainage treatment facilities, building the monitoring stations, developing reconciliation strategies and transferring funds to the water sector institutions,” read the document. “(Another) R5m of the allocation is for developing a five-year national strategy to deal with acid mine drainage in South Africa.” Water Affairs Minister Edna Molewa last week alluded to the construction of a pump system in the East Rand near Boksburg at a cost of R218m. Government spokesperson Jimmy Manyi said on Tuesday cabinet has accepted recommendations made to an inter-ministerial committee by a team of experts on how to deal with the threat of acid mine drainage in the Witwatersrand. According to a senior regional manager at the department of water affairs, Marius Keet, rising acid effluent in the Central Basin of the Witwatersrand would breach an environmentally critical level of 150m below surface in June 2012 if left unattended. By that time the department would have installed the necessary pumps – scheduled to be in operation by March 2012 – to prevent a possible natural disaster, Keet said. The export report is due to be made public on Thursday. “The report indicates issues we should be concerned about; all those issues are explained in detail in the report,” Minister in the Presidency Trevor Manuel said on Tuesday. “A series of pumping needs to happen, with different activities (applicable) to different parts.” The budget specified no other allocation for the treatment of acid mine drainage.
Source: Miningmx.com
Wellington – A strong earthquake killed at least 65 people in New Zealand’s second-biggest city of Christchurch, with more casualties expected as desperate rescuers picked through rubble to find people trapped in toppled buildings.
It was the second quake to hit the city in five months.
“We may well be witnessing New Zealand’s darkest day…The death toll I have at the moment is 65 and that may rise,” New Zealand Prime Minister John Key told local TV.
The 6.3 magnitude quake struck at lunchtime, when the streets and shops were thronged with people and the offices were still occupied.
War zone
Christchurch’s mayor described the city of almost 400 000 people as a war zone.
“There will be deaths, there will be a lot of injuries, there will be a lot of heartbreak in this city,” Mayor Bob Parker told Australian TV by phone.
Helicopters dumped giant buckets of water to try to douse a fire in one tall office building. A crane helped rescue workers trapped in another office block.
“I was in the square right outside the cathedral – the whole front has fallen down and there were people running from there. There were people inside as well,” said John Gurr, a camera technician who was in the city centre when the quake hit.
Authorities ordered major hospitals up and down the country to make room for quake victims. There were reports of a shortage of ambulances.
“A lady grabbed hold of me to stop falling over…We just got blown apart. Colombo Street, the main street, is just a mess…There’s lots of water everywhere, pouring out of the ground,” Gurr said.
Emergency crews picked through the rubble, including a multi-storey office building whose floors appeared to have pancaked on top of each other.
Silt, sand and gravel
Christchurch is built on silt, sand and gravel, with a water table beneath. In an earthquake, the water rises, mixing with the sand and turning the ground into a swamp and swallowing up sections of road and entire cars.
TV footage showed sections of road that had collapsed into a milky, sand-coloured lake right beneath the surface. One witness described the footpaths as like “walking on sand”.
Unlike last year’s even stronger tremor, which struck early in the morning when streets were virtually empty, people were walking or driving along streets when the shallow tremor struck, sending awnings and the entire faces of buildings crashing down.
Police said debris had rained down on two buses, crushing them, but there was no word whether anyone had been killed or injured.
The quake hit at 12:51 (23:51 GMT) at a depth of only 4km, according to the US Geological Survey.
“It’s huge, it’s just huge,” a priest told a TV reporter outside the remains of the city’s stone cathedral, part of which had been reduced to a pile of large sandstone blocks.
“I just don’t know whether there are people under this rubble,” he said, before he appeared to add in a quiet voice: “I think so.”
Johannesburg – South African metropolitans are heading for a major water crisis in 2020, a former director general of the department of water affairs has warned.
Mike Muller, who now serves as an adjunct professor at the University of the Witwatersrand and sits on the national planning commission, said at a Water and Energy Forum in Sandton this week that it was time for metropolitans to start “panicking” about their water supplies.
“I really do think in most of our metros, if we don’t panic now, if we don’t take action now, we will be in a crisis by 2020,” Muller said in comments quoted by the Saturday Star newspaper.
“We’re not going to run out of water, but there are some hotspots. EThekwini is actually the most vulnerable metro at the moment – they’ve been living a charmed life.”
Muller said eThekwini “should” have run out of water during the 2010 World Cup and that it “should” run out of water during the UN climate change talks this year, but the metro would “probably get away with it”.
No planning
“We know many municipal users are not planning at all, or if they are, they’re not acting on their plans,” Muller said.
“All stakeholders must… move into action or we’re in trouble. I think we need to panic at the right time and the right time is now.”
Muller said the Vaal system in Gauteng looked “disastrous”.
“We look as though we’re 25% short of water for the next ten years,” Muller said.
“By the time we implement phase 2 of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project [in 2019], we’ll have been at risk for 10 years. Guaranteed there will be a drought.”
He blamed farmers in the Vaal for stealing water for irrigation as well as water leakage and inefficient water use.
Muller said good water management was key to growth and development.
He said environmental campaigners around acid mine drainage, actually “distract” from the main challenges around water quality and were “more about” companies trying to make profits out of the tail end of the mining industry.
- SAPA
Source: News24
A rhino DNA sample kit is expected to help prosecutors be even tougher on those caught with rhino horns.
If DNA tests positively link a horn to a specific rhino carcass, suspects will no longer get away with only a charge of possession, they will also be charged with the illegal hunting of rhino and theft.
“DNA evidence can now be used to link suspects found in possession of horns with the actual carcass, irrespective of how much time has passed,” said Advocate Johan Kruger, national head of the Organised Crime component in the office of the National Director of Public Prosecutions.
Chief executive of South African National Parks (SANParks), David Mabunda, said the kit would also assist all rhino owners and managers to document individual rhinos in their care.
“We would like to encourage them to take full advantage of this opportunity so that we may be able to better protect our rhinos from criminals,” he said.
Mabunda said information gathered from the DNA samples would be stored on a central database accessible to registered professionals. A full DNA sample is estimated to cost about R1 680 per rhino, but Mabunda said initial DNA tests and registration would be done free of charge.
“This will also be freely available in the unfortunate case of a rhino poaching incident,” he said.
The department of genetics at Onderstepoort developed the DNA kit in collaboration with SANParks, the NPA and the Hawks.
The DNA kit was revealed to members of the National Wildlife Crime Reaction Unit from the NPA, Hawks, SANParks and environmental management investigators from provincial conservation authorities who recently attended a crime scene management course.
The course provided prosecutors with first hand experience of the challenges investigators face in securing and safe-guarding a scene in the veld. They also learned the methods used to search for, locate and collect specific evidence material on a scene.
Mabunda said SANParks and private funders were funding the DNA project.
He said SANParks would use funds from ivory sales in 2009 to contribute to the project. South African Breweries has also already sponsored R100 000 towards the project. No date has been set on when the DNA kits will start being used.
Mabunda said last month alone, South Africa lost 21 rhinos, while 31 arrests were made. In 2010, 333 rhinos were killed.
“The loss of 333 rhinos to poaching in 2010 was a devastating loss for SANParks. We are determined to curb that in 2011. Anyone who is involved in poaching at whatever level will be a prime target for our investigations and we will leave no stone unturned in this respect, including going for the kingpins of these operations,” said Mabunda. – BuaNews
Source: Simplygreen
Three Municipalities were identified as the first that will have serious water shortages. They are the City of Johannesburg, eThekwini in Durban and the Nelson Mandela Metro in Port Elizabeth.
The former Director General of Water Affairs, Mike Muller told representatives at the Water and Energy Forum in Johannesburg that a serious water crisis is looming in South Africa and that the demand will, by far, exceed supply by 2025, which is a mere 14 years away.
The reason given by Muller, included climate change, worsening water quality and leaking water pipes.
The vice-president of the International Water Resource Agency, Professor Antony Turton supported this and said that it is essential that a water crisis is averted NOW.
Source: RSG (Radio Sonder Grense)
Port Elizabeth – The Karoo was hit by flash floods at the weekend, The Herald reported on Monday.
More than 100mm of rain fell in 24 hours on Saturday and Sunday in and around the central Karoo towns of Graaff Reinet and Nieu Bethesda.
In some places, 75mm fell in just 30 minutes, causing farm dams to burst.
Police and disaster management officials were on high alert and ready to evacuate residents where necessary.
In Graaff Reinet, the town’s Nqweba Dam swelled to its highest level in more than 36 years on Sunday.
The newspaper reported that the dam rose to 116% capacity on Sunday morning.
“It looks like more rain is on the way,” said the area’s disaster management head, Christopher Rhoode.
In Lester Brown’s new book “World on the Edge,” he says mankind has pushed civilisation to the brink of collapse by bleeding aquifers dry and overploughing land to feed an ever-growing population, while overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
If we continue to sap Earth’s natural resources, “civilisational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when,” Brown, the founder of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, which both seek to create a sustainable society, said.
What distinguishes “World on the Edge” from his dozens of other books is “the sense of urgency,” Brown said. “Things could start unravelling at any time now and it’s likely to start on the food front.
“We’ve got to get our act together quickly. We don’t have generations or even decades, we’re one poor harvest away from chaos,” he said.
Saving civilisation
“We have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the question now is, can we save civilisation?”
In “World on the Edge”, Brown points to warning signs and lays out arguments for why he believes the cause of the chaos will be the unsustainable way that mankind is going about producing more and more food.
Resources are already beginning to be depleted, and that could cause a global “food bubble” created by overusing land and water to meet the exponential growth in demand for food – grain, in particular – to burst.
Two huge dustbowls have formed in the world, one in Africa and the other in China and Mongolia, because of soil erosion caused by over ploughing.
In Lesotho, the grain harvest has dropped by more than half over the last decade or two because of soil erosion, Brown said.
In Saudi Arabia, grain supplies are shrinking as a fossil aquifer drilled in, in the 1970s to sustain domestic grain production is running dry after years of “over pumping” to meet the needs of a population that wants to consume more meat and poultry.
Other impacts on grain supply
Global warming is also impacting the global supply of grain, which Brown calls the foundation of the world food economy.
Every one-degree-Celsius rise above the normal temperature results in a 10% fall in grain yields, something that was painfully visible in Russia last year, where a seven-week heatwave killed tens of thousands and caused the grain harvest to shrink by 40%.
Food prices soared in Russia as a result of the poor harvest, and Russia, which is one of the top wheat exporters in the world, cut off grain exports.
Different grains are staple foods in most of the world, and foods like meat and dairy products are “grain-intensive.”
It takes 3.2 kilograms of grain fed to a cow to produce a pound of beef, and around 1.8 kilograms of grain to produce a pound of cheese, Brown said.
Painting a grim picture
In “World on the Edge”, Brown paints a grim picture of how a failed harvest could spark a grain shortage that would send food prices sky-rocketing, cause hunger to spread, governments to collapse and states to fail.
Food riots would erupt in low-income countries and “with confidence in the world grain market shattered, the global economy could start to unravel,” Brown warned.
But Brown still believes civilisational collapse can be averted, if there is a mass effort to confront threats such as global warming, soil erosion and falling water tables, not military superpowers.
(Sapa, Karin Zeitvogel, January 2011)
Source: News24
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