HEALTH-SOUTH AFRICA: Too Few Trained Personnel. Too Much Aluminium?

Steven Lang

GRAHAMSTOWN, Feb 22 2008 (IPS) – The precarious state of water distribution in Grahamstown, a city in the south-east of South Africa, was highlighted again this month when taps ran dry for almost two days (Feb. 8 and 9) in a large section of the city. Grahamstown #39s reticulation system has failed residents several times over the last fourteen months in terms of water quality and reliability of supplies.

Sediment lurks in a bottle of Grahamstown tap water. Credit: Mana Meadows/IPS

While the system is in a state of disrepair, the latest incident had nothing to do with lack of maintenance, but rather human error.

According to a senior municipal official who asked not to be named, a city employee neglected to open a valve to the Waainek reservoir that services much of the western part of Grahamstown. This memory lapse appears symptomatic of how a lack of properly trained staff is affecting water distribution in Grahamstown, and the country as a whole.

A research officer at the Grahamstown-based Institute for Water Research (IWR), Lil Haigh, says not enough is being done to recruit qualified engineers into the municipality. Grahamstown should offer bursaries and explain to young people how many job opportunities there are in science and engineering, she told IPS.

Earlier difficulties

Water problems made local and provincial headlines in November 2006 when Martin Davies, a senior aquaculture and fisheries development scientist at Rhodes University, also in Grahamstown, sounded alarm bells about the apparent toxicity of the local water supply. He manages a large complex of tanks holding 150,000 fish at the experimental fish farm on campus.
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Davies alerted university authorities when 35,000 of his rainbow trout fingerlings suddenly died. He said the way his fish were swimming in spirals before turning belly up on the surface of the water was a clear indication that they were dying from aluminium poisoning.

Immediately, students were warned not to drink the water on campus or even use it for cooking, this as the university trucked in thousands of bottles of water from Port Elizabeth, 135 kilometres to the west. Local supermarkets sold vast amounts of mineral water, and there was a run on every kind of water filter imaginable.

The university also arranged for a series of water quality tests aimed at identifying the source of the problem. These were supervised by Nikite Muller, deputy director of the IWR; after a few days, she pronounced the water safe to drink.

The mayor of the city, Phumelelo Kate, publicly expressed his confidence in the IWR #39s assessment of the water quality. He called a media conference and in front of clicking cameras drank a glass of slightly brownish tap water.

When supplies were restored after the break in service earlier this month, the water was again muddy, and supermarkets ordered extra supplies of mineral water.

Aluminium, still?

But, Davies is convinced that the water system in Grahamstown still carries dangerously high levels of aluminium, arguing that the IWR never picked up these concentrations because they never tested for it . He only drinks bottled water, or supplies that have gone through a sophisticated filtration system installed at his home.

Davies told IPS that an independent laboratory in Port Elizabeth and the national Department of Water Affairs and Forestry have both supported his claim that there are hazardous levels of aluminium in Grahamstown #39s water supply.

He has identified two sources that he believes are responsible for aluminium concentrations.

Firstly, the clay in soil surrounding Grahamstown has a very high aluminium content that has probably found its way into the water, Davies says. The content is so high, in fact, that a Japanese company wanted to come here to mine it.

The second source is the aluminium flocculent, either in granular or tablet form, that the municipality uses to kill algae and make the water more transparent. This internationally accepted procedure works well if it is properly managed, but if untrained staff use incorrect dosages or if poorly maintained equipment allows for accumulations of the flocculent, it can lead to a dangerous build-up of the metal.

In an interview with IPS, Muller insisted that the amount of aluminium in the water is within recommended levels, and that supplies are safe to drink . However, she added that if the water emerges from taps muddy it would be a good idea to let it stand for about thirty minutes to allow the sediment to settle.

She said filters could be used to reduce the amount of sediment in drinking water, but that they were not essential: I drink water straight from the taps here at the institute, and I spend most of my day here.

Trout are more sensitive to water conditions than humans, Muller noted, adding that even if water quality was in some way responsible for the death of the fish, it did not mean the water was unfit for human consumption.

Small quantities of aluminium in water supplies are not dangerous because the metal is flushed out of our bodies with other waste material.

Large amounts of aluminium can build up in body tissue, however. Aluminium in water supplies has been linked to Alzheimer #39s disease and other forms of dementia in some parts of the world, but the exact nature of this linkage remains uncertain.