Friday 26 June 2009

Ocean dumping ...

I came across these slides I took in 1977:


A beautiful beach just outside Accra.


The surf zone turned this colour after one of the regular discharges of untreated nightsoil!

Has anything improved since then? No − these photos were taken in October last year:


Septic tanks are emptied by small-scale operatives (proud of their work − and rightly so),


but the tankers still discharge to the ocean.

Will it ever end? It just might when the British-funded UASB treatment plant becomes operational again (one of its pumps broke down soon after commissioning and it's been put of action ever since). AfDB is proposing to fund the rehabilitation of the plant − with a stock of spare pumps! [You'd have thought, wouldn't you, that ODA or now DFID would have sorted this out years ago. Ain't bureaucrats strange?]