CoCT urged to be more proactive when handling sewage spills in suburban areas
Health and water quality expert Doctor Jo Barnes said sewage spills pose major health and environmental risks.
Picture: @CityofCT/X
CAPE TOWN - An epidemiologist has urged the City of Cape Town to be more proactive when dealing with sewage spills in suburban areas.
This, after a group of Hout Bay residents shared concerns about ongoing sewage overflows in the area.
Health and water quality expert, Doctor Jo Barnes, said that sewage spills posed major health and environmental risks.
Barnes, a senior lecturer at Stellenbosch University’s Department of Global Health, said that officials often underestimated the health risks that sewage spills posed.
"It contains a lot of organisms that carry infectious diseases such as bacteria and viruses and parasites."
City Mayco Member for Urban Mobility Rob Quintas said the average response time for attending to service requests was 30 days.
"When the road is flooded or the property is waterlogged, the response time can be up to five days. It is important to note that these are a guide, and the situation sometimes does not lend itself to the response time, such as when our teams need to deal with the continuous overflow of a sewer."
Barnes has urged city officials to react to sewage overflows in suburban areas with more urgency.