At yesterday’s Community Services Section 80 meeting in the Knysna Council Chambers, pollution of the Knysna and Swartvlei estuaries raised it’s ugly head as it always does.

Mike Maughan-Brown (Director Planning and Development) may be right in that the tide cleans away the ecoli in the swimming areas of Knysna but is that good enough? He expressed that he was happy with the health of the Knysna Estuary. In opposition, James McCarthy (Assistant Head of Municipal Health for the Lakes Area) said, “We are very concerned about land based pollution entering the [Knysna] Estuary.”

Their positions gives support to the rumour that McCarthy was upset in December 2014 when a local government press release was printed by local newspapers saying all was well. It was as Orwellian as the positive readings that occasionally appear in the Action Ads, odd because the negative readings don’t. There seems to be manipulation of the citizen and tourist mindset afoot.

Don’t forget that No Swimming signs were only put up at Swartvlei after i raised the issue in this blog. Then, after refusing to open the estuary mouth for months, SANParks did so which seemed as if losing the argument was less worrying than keeping the signs up for the holiday season. Yet they should have stayed up because the Swartvlei mouth and The Island (the urban community within it) showed the same danger readings as the wastewater from Sedgefield’s treatment works.

3 of 4 of Knysna’s wastewater treatment works failed the ecoli test in December, showing more than 5 times the permissible count. Sedgefield is apparently on the verge of been repaired but why wasn’t it for the very long time it has been problematic???

Mike Maughan-Brown

What we are still not being told is where contaminated wastewater is being disposed of? It’s a big question because Knysna Municipality doesn’t have Harry Potter on standby to evaporate it with a swish of his wand.

Despite my posting the blog Is Weed Killer Poisoning Knysna? 3 days before the Section 80 meeting, not one of the more than a dozen politicians and councillors raised the issue. Neither did they address bother to address the sea lettuce that covered our shores last month.

It seems that when there’s a problem, the public are being kept in the dark by Knysna Municipality, SANParks and the Knysna Basin Project. Will James McCarthy remember that he serves the public and grow some balls to challenge the status quo? Despairingly, McCarthy has previously refused to meet with me. The only thing that they all (Eden District, George and Knysna) have in common is that they are DA controlled… and i’m banned by the DA because they do not want to answer my many, many questions.