Monitoring, mediating and handling complaints have merely been some of the functions fulfilled by the St Helena Bay Water Quality Trust (SHBWQT) that has now closed its doors.
For 23 years the trust was a non-governmental organisation that accepted shared responsibility for maintaining the health, diversity, sustainability and productivity of the coastal environment. The trust’s work focussed primarily in St Helena and the Bergrivier estuary.
In a short release on Tuesday Jan Marx, who has been part of the SHBWQT since its establishment, explained that the trust was terminated due to insufficient funds. “The trust will therefore not be taking water samples for analyses (E coli & Intestinal enterococci) and be able to provide data to external institutions anymore,” he wrote.
For years the trust released its annual State of the Bay report which included a comprehensive overall water quality-monitoring programme in St Helena Bay, Velddrif and Laaiplek.
The closure of the trust is a blow for locals and the environment alike as it was often the first port of call where the public could take their concerns and complaints about local environmental issues.
“The trust was set up 23 years ago jointly by decision of a grouping of fish processing plants (FPPs), representatives of the local community and representatives of the two (at that time) local municipalities. The intention was to monitor, in broad terms, the state of the bay,” the trust’s chairperson, Colin de Kock, explains.
“Funding has always been mostly by the four FPPs, a form of ‘polluter pays’ principle as well as other voluntary contributors,” he adds.
For the most part the largest part of the SHBWQT annual budget, around 90% of it, came from the FPPs with smaller contributions by the Bergrivier and Saldanha Bay Municipalities as well as local business owners and local home-owners associations.
The Oceana Group, which entails Amawandle and Lucky Star, withdrew from the trust. However, Pioneer Fishing and West Point Processors stayed on as contributing entities of the Trust.
De Kock says the trust could no longer operate without those funds.
Aside from water quality monitoring the operations of the trust also included the monitoring of local factories’ Coastal Waters Discharge Permit (CWDPs) and investigations of pollution occurrences and record keeping of incidents. Part of the record keeping was to keep the community informed of the safety of local beaches for recreational use.
De Kock explains although the annual cost of running the trust varied over a cycle of three years, the budget for the year 2023-’24 and to produce the State of the Bay research and report by an independent organisation was R1,7 million.
“The largest ongoing expense each year was for the cost of collection of water samples and analysis of those samples every two weeks throughout the year. The budget for this 2023-’24 year was R375 000,” De Kock says.
The Trust and locals alike are concerned about what the lack of the independent monitoring body means for St Helena Bay. “The Trust is extremely concerned. Investigation of pollution occurrences and record keeping of these incidents will not be executed by anybody and there is no formal mechanism for them to be reported to the Municipality, there will be no early indication if beaches or waterways, monitored up to now by the trust, become unfit for recreational use.”
The annual State of the Bay Report will now not be compiled and according to the trust the progress on the standardisation of Coastal Water Discharge Permits will not be monitored.
“The only monitoring of discharges into the bay by the four FPPs will be monitored by the FPPs themselves in terms of the conditions of the CWDPs; this is an excellent example of the problem of ‘the fox guarding the henhouse’.
The DEFF has no capacity to analyse the information provided to them by the FPPs and has no capacity to do any regular monitoring of its own,” De Kock explains.
The 2023 State of the Bay found considerable work has to be done in maintaining and restoring the health of the Bay, especially regarding the large volumes of fish factory effluent and bilge water being discharged into the Bay. The team found very little of effluent and bilge water was compliant with the existing effluent quality standards.
Beyond the monitoring and analysis done by the trust, educational community projets like beach clean ups and school visits will also now cease to be done.
