EDWIN NAIDU
A WEBSITE launched under the leadership of University of KwaZulu Natal’s Environmental Fluid Mechanics Lab (EFML) Co-Director, Dr Justin Pringle, can provide real-time guidance to beachgoers in Durban regarding the safety of water at popular beaches for swimming.
This comes after the increase in sewage pollution along the coastline, with Durban’s beaches often demonstrating critically high levels of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a harmless bacteria found in the guts of healthy people and animals that indicates the presence of faecal matter in the water.
While E. coli decays rapidly in a marine environment, making it a less-than-ideal indicator, harmful pathogens from sewage pollution may still be present and threaten human and aquatic health, causing diseases including cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, and more.
In response to these challenges and in the interest of providing scientific information to the public, Pringle launched Woz’Olwandle, meaning “come to the sea” in isiZulu. Based on a tool developed for Los Angeles beaches in the United States (US), the Beach Report Card, the Woz’Olwandle website features information synthesised by a fluid dynamics computer model that was developed by UKZN’s Professor Derek Stretch (who heads up the EFML with Pringle) and alumnus Mr Dave Mardon, now an Associate at Water Environment Ltd in the United Kingdom, in the early 2000s.
This model was repurposed to process several data and estimate the concentrations of E. coli at six central Durban beaches over 24 hours, using a key of three “smiley” icons in green, orange, or red to indicate whether conditions are “good”, “acceptable”, or “poor”.
The website is hosted on a US server to prevent outages caused by ongoing load-shedding in South Africa.
Pringle hopes that the tool will not only provide the most up-to-date information for people to use in deciding if and where to swim but also spark discussion about the problem of sewage pollution and potential solutions. Real-time information is important because other information provided on water quality takes time to gather, analyse, and release, often making it out of date by the time users receive it.
The Woz’Olwandle website has already attracted attention for its efforts with 3 500 visits over the past month, from South Africa, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, China, Australia, and Germany.
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