Nelson Mandela Bay residents complained for close to a month about brown water spewing from their taps before the municipality took action. This was despite chemical tests at water sampling points in the metro showing that the problem was flagged as early as 3 January.
From the middle of January, taps around Nelson Mandela Bay began releasing discoloured water, sometimes tinged with white, which metro officials insisted was safe to drink.
At the time, there was a widespread water outage in Kariega, leaving residents without water for days. But three weeks earlier, chemical water tests had already shown that something was going wrong with the metro’s water supply. On 3 January, water taken from 13 testing points across the metro failed safety standards for colour. Water from 11 points had unacceptably high levels of aluminium, while nine samples tested positive for bromodichloromethane.
“However, strong reservations about inferring a causal relationship are warranted in view of the failure of these studies to account for demonstrated confounding factors and for total aluminium intake from all sources.