A few miles off the coast of Durban a female humpback whale and its calf – the last of thousands that migrated along South Africa’s east coast from May to December – splash their fins playfully on the surface of the Indian Ocean.
Out in the deep, they are unperturbed by a murky brown sheen sitting on the surface of the South African city’s harbour, where brilliantly white yachts worth millions of rand float in water contaminated with human excrement.
“We all call it Shit Creek,” said Brad Groddler, 50, a boat captain who takes tourists out for whale-watching and fishing trips.
Ever since deadly floods in April last year damaged an already ailing sewage and water system, millions of litres of untreated sewage have spilled into the beaches, rivers, harbours and ocean in and around Durban.
Between April and December many of the city’s beaches – which usually draw hundreds of thousands of tourists for the southern hemisphere’s summer – were closed after critical levels of E coli, a bacteria that can cause diarrhoea, vomiting and fever, were found in the water.
Nine months after the floods, environmental scientists say contamination is still a big problem.
“We’ve had mass fish kills on the Umgeni River system [and in] Isipingo and Umhlanga,” said Siraj Paruk, an environmental specialist, “mainly due to sewer inflows into these systems which cause the oxygen levels to collapse and fish to die.”
According to the eThekwini metropolitan municipality, which includes Durban, the April floods caused about 800m rand (almost £40m) worth of damage to eight sewage treatment plants. Footage from the time of raw sewage, solid faeces, dissolved toilet paper and brown sludge in the Umgeni River continues to be circulated widely on social media.
But Durban’s ageing municipal hydraulic infrastructure and wastewater treatment plants have struggled for decades.
Adjacent to the city’s glistening Nelson Mandela cruise terminal, the Mahatma Gandhi Road sewer pump station has had a history of pump design issues.
Nazeer Jamal, a local environmental scientist who worked with the eThekwini municipality for a decade from 2009, said maintenance issues were not new and that “the signs were there for a failing system”.
The sewage crisis has been compounded by South Africa’s energy crisis –specifically the planned nationwide power cuts known locally as load shedding, which can damage the pumps in pump stations.
Several beaches were closed in Cape Town before Christmas after electric failures from load shedding caused raw sewage to overflow.
For Durban’s tourism and hospitality sector, the sewage issue came on top of two years of pandemic disruption.
Not one beach in the metropolitan area of eThekwini was re-awarded the internationally recognised blue flag status for 2022-23.
“The amount of calls we get from people looking to come down on holiday worried about the E coli in the sea and deciding to put off their holiday has been really disheartening,” said Luke Thomson, who runs a fishing charter service in Durban.
The situation has been exacerbated by the growth of informal settlements around the city that use rivers and streams for waste disposal, the vandalism of contraptions built to catch large solid waste and the theft from pump stations of metal parts subsequently sold as scrap.
“It’s taking a mighty long time to repair the infrastructure,” Paruk said. “Some of it has been attended to, but there’s still a long way to go.”
On 1 December Mxolisi Thomas Kaunda, the mayor of eThekwini, declared on his Facebook page that Durban’s beaches were “ready to host visitors”. But since then beaches have opened and closed depending on E coli levels, sowing confusion for local people and visitors.
Some opposition politicians have questioned the quality of the testing being done at the beaches and urged beachgoers to exercise caution. However, a spokesperson for eThekwini municipality defended the testing regime, telling local media: “The fact that we closed beaches when the water quality was poor is reason enough that we care for the public. The municipality is continuously monitoring water quality at all beaches to ensure the safety of residents and visitors.”
Anja du Plessis, an associate professor at the University of South Africa, who has researched water quality trends in the area for more than 12 years, urged authorities to conduct more frequent sampling. “Beaches and rivers with an E coli count above 130 counts/100ml should be avoided,” she said.
The Umgeni River in particular has recorded particularly high E coli readings.
Driving his boat through murky waters near the mouth of the river, Groddler pointed mournfully to his left. “This is the last of Durban’s mangroves,” he said. “They’re endangered, and they’re just getting all this pollution.”
A lone fisher waded out barefoot, casting a net into the water where a burning, putrid smell hangs in the air. “It’s completely toxic,” Groddler said. “I wouldn’t eat anything out of this.”
