Durban - A private Durban crematorium which has been kept busy by problems at a municipal facility is itself now in trouble, with the city’s Health Department ordering the shutdown of two of its furnaces over pollution concerns.
The order was given after the Clare Estate Umgeni Hindu Crematorium failed to respond in time to queries about what it was doing to address above-normal emissions readings at its No 4 and No 5 cremators, two of five at the facility.
The No 4 furnace at Clare Estate had shown mercury readings about four-and-a-half times the normal limit, while the No 5 furnace had a carbon monoxide reading that was two-and-a-half times the norm.
The mercury comes from the teeth fillings in cremated bodies, while the carbon monoxide is unburnt fuel.
“A total of 60 tests were carried out on the five cremators and only two results were above the limits. More than 95% of the samples were at an acceptable level,” said Pradeep Ramlall, the chemical engineer for the non-profit society which operates the crematorium and which provides a service predominantly for KwaZulu-Natal’s Hindu community.
“These are very minute readings taken over a very short period of time. It is not as if there were huge amounts of chemicals gushing out. There was no threat to anyone’s health.
“Municipality Health Department officials agreed with us that the results looked like being anomalies,” he said.
“The two cremators were shut down because we failed to respond in time about what corrective action we were going to take.
“It was not because we did not want to respond either, but we were held up with protracted delays about the results from the specialised company we used to carry out the air quality tests.
“There were major grammatical and technical errors in their report. They got the conversion units wrong which would have given results about 1 000% above the acceptable levels.”
Ramlall said that they could not submit the necessary reduction plan to the city’s Health Department if the test figures were wrong.
“We could not place reliance on the quality test report and subsequent ones, and only received the final report on October 17.
“Then we had to table it at a board meeting on October 29 before issuing it to the city’s Health Department.”
The reduction plan had been due on October 21 and the Health Department issued a notice on October 26 to stop using cremators 4 and 5, which were then under repairs and maintenance, Ramlall said.
“We had already decided to take down 4 and 5 for maintenance as we wanted to find out what, if anything, was wrong.
“A successful meeting was held with city Health officials on November 1… The department has since received the reduction plan for the two pollutants, which includes carrying out minor repair and maintenance work.
“No 4 cremator has been repaired and was granted permission to be brought back into operation last Friday. We are awaiting a part for No 5 which has to come from Italy.”
The Health Department has now asked that cremator No 4 be retested for mercury, and cremator No 5 be retested for carbon monoxide, and the society will be calling in another service provider to do the job.
The testing had become necessary because the society’s provisional atmospheric emission licence expires at the end of this month.
eThekwini Municipality is the designated regulator for the Air Quality Act, as amended.
Deeps Nundkissoor, the president of the crematorium’s board, said that the 115-year-old crematorium had never encountered a problem before and even though No 4 furnace had been closed down for a week, and No 5 was waiting for a spare part, the crematorium was still able to cope with the demand.
A former deputy mayor of Durban, Kamal Panday, who was speaking at a funeral at the crematorium yesterday, told the Daily News that the Clare Estate facility was also having to deal with the overflow from other crematoriums, like Mobeni Heights.
About two weeks ago, the remaining functioning furnace at the municipality’s Mobeni Heights Crematorium went out of action, creating hardship and expense for mourning families.
That furnace has also since been put back into action, but a second furnace at the facility, which serves Chatsworth, was not expected to be back in operation until August next year.
The municipality had yet to respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.