Durban — UPL South Africa (Pty) Ltd says it continues to effectively mitigate risk in line with the government’s directive amid unprecedented rains and flooding.
In a statement, UPL said that since the attack on its leased Cornubia facility during the July unrest in 2021, it has committed enormous time and resources to the extensive process of remediating and rehabilitating the affected environment.
UPL said that these efforts have been successful as many of the affected areas no longer pose a threat to human health or the environment – despite some irresponsible and misleading reports to the contrary.
The company said that it has, throughout the clean-up and rehabilitation process acted in liaison with and under the direction of the responsible government agencies.
“In line with this cooperative approach, UPL will continue to comply with its obligations and take all reasonable and possible steps to continue to make progress in terms of the remediation and rehabilitation work,” UPL said.
Speaking on last week’s heavy rains, UPL said that its proactive approach has meant that it was able to offset the impact of the heavier-than-predicted rainfall over the last week which led to flash flooding in parts of eThekwini.
UPL said that over 108mm of rain fell over 13 January, with a massive 102mm falling over a two-hour period, at the Mount Edgecombe weather station.
“UPL has consistently managed the Pollution Control Dam (PCD) at the site of the Cornubia warehouse arson attack at levels in line with the direction of the responsible government agencies. The PCD was just one of many measures put in place to help contain the spill that resulted from the attack on UPL’s Cornubia facility.
“Despite treating PCD water for release as allowed by the DWS directive in order to lower the PCD levels, and taking other contingency measures, which included having over 26 water tankers on site to extract and store water from the PCD, the volume of water which flowed through the catchment area due to the incredibly heavy rains led to the PCD overtopping overnight between January 13 and 14,” UPL explained.
“It is important to note that the water in the PCD and in the surrounding system was tested before and after the rains and the results of these tests indicate that the PCD water itself, prior to having been treated through the treatment plant and without the dilution from rainwater, contained an already very low concentration of chemicals and did not pose an environmental risk, or a human health risk.”
UPL said that the independent expert team has modelled the amount of water which would have flowed through the catchment area which feeds the PCD and calculated that the water which overtopped would have been massively diluted further, meaning that more than adequate levels of dilution was achieved to ensure the overtopped water posed no threat to the environment or human health.
“The extensive remediation and rehabilitation process undertaken by UPL, and the team of independent experts is ongoing. Promisingly, animal and plant life have returned to many areas of the system. Experts have also led trials revegetating areas of the system which have led to successes. Pleasingly, the specialists have confirmed that there is no longer any public health concern in the beach exclusion zone which arose from the arson incident,” UPL said.
“However, aspects of the work have been hampered by the high levels of E. coli present in the tributary, river and estuary, due to the sewage infrastructure failures at the municipal Northern and uMhlanga sewerage works. Test results have shown consistently high levels of E. coli (as high as fourteen million parts per 100ml in the river and over 5000 in the estuary) which are far above accepted safety levels.
“These elevated E. coli levels pose a real and direct threat to human health, including in the beach exclusion zone, and UPL has notified the eThekwini municipality of these levels. E. coli levels of this nature, along with other substances present in the raw sewage also pose a risk to plant and animal life recovery,” UPL said.
UPL reiterated that it has committed enormous time and resources to the extensive process of rehabilitating the broader affected environment and it is committed to continuing to do all it can to go into the future.
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