A growing pile of used medical waste, including glass vials, needles and syringes, has been dumped close to East London’s Bridle Drift Dam, and an East London tourism business owner has secured an interim court order ordering the metro and its manager to clean it up. Siseko Yelani said he had gone to the Eastern London high court after his pleas to the municipality to stop the dumping and clean up the mess fell on deaf ears.
While some parts of the Eastern Cape are finally out of the drought, dams on the western side of the province are still below average and Nelson Mandela Bay Metro continues to face Day Zero, with its combined dam levels at below 19%. While some parts of the Eastern Cape are finally out of the d.
Eastern Cape dam levels are below 50%, with the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality and the Sarah Baartman district the worst affected by the drought.
Illegal sand mining is booming in the drought-impacted river bed of Buffalo City’s largest supplier of drinking water, Bridle Drift Dam. With drought having shrunk the dam by 80%, leaving only 20 million cubic metres out of 98 when full, residents have watched in shock as a daily stream of tipper and flatbed trucks, and bakkies loaded with workers and spades pour onto the receding sandy bottom at the upper end of the dam, and take as much as they can.