On Monday 20th June, the Liesbeek Leisure Property Trust (LLPT) released a press statement indicating that they were going to be undertaking works on the River Club site. They claimed this was ‘re-initiating work’ at the site.  This follows a previous facebook announcement by the LLPT on the 16 May that they were going to undertake emergency work to prevent flooding and damage to the site ahead of the rainy season. 

However, they cannot ‘re-initiate’ anything that is interdicted by the courts and any provocative claims otherwise are merely hubris. What they are actually doing is dealing with the damage their hasty and careless pursuit of construction has created. By infilling the river and floodplain, they have left vast tracts of the area vulnerable to flooding and their construction site vulnerable to damage. Hence, they need to stop a disaster.

But what is also abundantly clear from their admission is that the Liesbeek River is not the ‘neglected stormwater gutter’ they like to talk about.  Rather, it is clear that it is a living river that flows, and it floods in winter. 

The cycle of pictures above shows how the LLPT tried to infill the original river channel to the West of the site in February. But they have now been forced to clear the infill and open the river because of the risk of flooding and damage to surrounding houses and to the site. What you see now is a river - not a stream and not a gutter – a fulsome water body capable of supporting aquatic life in abundance, of absorbing heat and moderating temperature in summer, of mitigating flooding in winter and of contributing to climate resilience. Too small to view in the image above, taken a few days ago and 24 hours after heavy rains, is a blacksmith plover on the river bank, squawking noisily over its future nesting site, showing that life displaced from the construction site will gradually return to restore ecosystems disrupted by the thoughtless engineering of greedy humans. 

Presumably, the LLPT went ahead with infilling the river in February because they were over-confident the Judge would not award the interdict. But like many of their other decisions, when they went ahead recklessly pursuing construction, aware that a court might rule against them, they were wrong. And as Judge Goliath re-affirmed in her May 5th judgement, the LLPT had continued with construction at their own risk.

That the Liesbeek channel to the west of the site receives stormwater run-off is true, but that is no different from most of 9km course of the Liesbeek upstream, and, in fact, no different from all the other urban rivers in Cape Town. Receiving storm water is no reason to infill a river; quite to the contrary, in their appeal of the Environmental Authorisation the City’s Environmental Management division noted that the Liesbeek channel performed an important stormwater polishing function which they lamented would be lost if the river were infilled. 

That the river is also neglected is also true. But the LLPT never comment on who is doing the neglecting. In the first instance, it is the City of Cape Town that failed to adequately maintain the hydrological connection between the Liesbeek north and south of Observatory Road. And there is absolutely no evidence that the LLPT has invested any effort in maintaining the rivers on the site of their property. Rather, they have refused the Friends of the Liesbeek access to work on any cleaning or rehabilitation of that stretch of the river, and were, in fact, served with a compliance notice in 2013 for depositing soil in the river, reportedly to remodel the river bank. 

But what is most obvious is that the original river course can never be characterised as a gutter, as was done by the LLPT’s planner at the Municipal Planning Tribunal in 2018. This fiction has only served one purpose - to enable the LLPT to justify filling in a river where all around the world, the best practice for Climate Change resilience is to ‘make room for the river’ as a global model for water management and protection against increased risks of flooding linked to climate change.

More importantly, as pointed out by Mike Mentis, a highly experienced wetland ecologist and land rehabilitation specialist, the development will place 65% of the watercourse under roads, buildings and bridge footprints, curtailing normal soil ecological functions and disrupting conduits for water flows, flood attenuation, aquifer recharge, carbon sequestration and biodiversity support. In fact, as he points out, loss of environmental services in the development footprint could be considered to be near total for some functions. 

So, from having an functioning (though not perfect) riverine environment, the developers have created a disaster in the making by infilling the flood plain and the river. The water you see in the photos above is not from stormwater gutter flow-off from Observatory but from 9km of upstream river. It is water that will flow to the sea as it has for past millenia. Thankfully, the river is not dead and it will recover. The actions of the LLPT to infill the river are not only a heritage crime but environmentally unsound practice of the most extreme degree. 

To reverse all this, we are still locked in a court battle for which we really need your support for our legal fees. 

Please help us fund these legal costs by contributing at our fundraising site.  

Visit our website and follow the Liesbeek Action Campaign on twitter: @LiesbeekAction. 

Make the Liesbeek Matter!