By Nneka Nwogwugwu
A warehouse storing chemicals was set ablaze during recent looting, poisoning a nearby estuary and strangling incomes of fishermen.
No sooner had the looting stopped than fisherman Bobby Pillay found out that the beach has become poisonous for fishes.
The beach glistened with poisoned fish, hundreds of them lying inert on the wet sand, slick with chemicals.
“I have never seen a thing like this,” said 76-year-old Pillay from his home in Phoenix, a town north of central Durban that was badly hit by July’s riots.
“This is devastating for us, on top of lockdown, this just adds fuel to the fire,” he said, holding up a local news clipping about the spill.
The cull came after looters – believed to have been spurred on by the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma – set fire to a warehouse owned by India’s UPL Ltd.
It took more than a week to control the blaze and stem the slew of chemicals that ran off from the firefighting into nearby uMhlanga estuary.
UPL said it was “committed to making all efforts to eliminate (its chemicals) from the environment”, confirming the warehouse held a number of pesticides and fungicides that could cause skin, eye and respiratory irritation.
The company had no quick answers to more detailed questions posed by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
While the true extent of the damage is not publicly known, hundreds of subsistence fishermen have seen the waters they have fished lifelong cordoned off.
“This is a tragedy that should never have happened,” Desmond D’Sa, co-founder of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), an environmental justice organisation, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.