South Africa is RIGHT up there with China and India in terms of air pollution. An acrid pall of poisonous smog hangs permanently over the Vaal Triangle. If you drive through Witbank on a windless day, make sure you have an oxygen cylinder in your car with drop-down masks for every passenger. C oal-fired furnaces and power stations are to blame for pouring thousands of tons of noxious gasses into our fragile atmosphere. With millions of tons of coal reserves sitting underground, yet to be mined, our government seems oblivious to the pollution danger in their quest to supply electricity to the nation. Wind-powered turbines are still considered a novelty by our illustrious government, yet we have the windiest coastline anywhere.
Surely it’s worth considering as another alternative to coal? And especially in Port Elizabeth where the wind never stops blowing. Then Coega’s industrial park smelters wouldn’t have to rely on a coal power station for electricity. Because where is all this coal supposed to come from? Apparently from our farms in the Stormberg area of the Eastern Cape, as we discovered at a meeting convened by a coal exploration company which has government’s backing. Our farms, and many others, have been earmarked for core sample drilling and the authorities imply there’s precious little we can do about it as we only have surface rights to our land.
“Peppering the area with rigs drilling down 200m will bugger up the underground springs and the water table that we are solely reliant on in our semi-arid area,” neighbour Jan fumed. “And it doesn’t stop there. coal is found in viable quantities, the value of our farms will nosedive if they decide to mine it. What’s more important than feeding our population from productive farms with unpolluted water and uncontaminated soil?
So, Townie, we’ll have to go off to the lawyers, and the Constitutional Court if necessary! We have to make them think again!” “No way am I going back to smog-clogged Gauteng where every breath takes you nearer to your grave,” told Jan. “To quote Churchill: ‘we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!’” “Yes, and we’ll make the drillers’ lives a living hell!” Jan added defiantly. – Derek Christopher |fw
