By News24The City of Cape Town"deliberately or negligently" withheld information about sewage contamination of seawater in the tender information for building a desalination plant at the V&A Waterfront, Quality Filtration Systems argues in court papers.
The City has a marine outfall pipe at Green Point, where raw sewage is disposed of through a pipe that is several kilometres long. “It unilaterally imposed new and more stringent specifications for desalination to compensate for high levels of sewage in the water uptake,” the papers said.“Had the plaintiff [QFS] been informed that it would be required to tender and construct a desalination plant to desalinate water with levels of contamination which were deliberately, alternatively, negligently, withheld from it, [QFS] would not have tendered nor invested R37m in the project,” the company said in papers.Of this, R7.
The court papers quote the terms of the tender, which state that the supplier of the desalinated water would get a monthly fixed payment – an “availability cost” – that it “shall receive regardless of whether the purchaser [the City] required production or not, as long as the water produced is as per specification”.