Pomona dumpsite fire surpasses prescribed WHO air pollution levels 

The Environmental Management Agency (EMA) of Zimbabwe has advised the Harare City Council to take urgent action to stop the Pomona dumpsite fires in Borrowdale suburb which have been raging for a long time now. This phenomenon is contributing to serious air pollution and a health threat to Harare residents.

 According to EMA, although this is a challenge affecting many local authorities around the country in terms of management of their dumpsites, Pomona dumpsite has been singled out to be the worst affected. EMA Environmental Education and Publicity Manager, Amkela Sidange said that major fires at the dumpsite have been recorded in 2016, 2018 and the recent one in August this year.

“EMA has issued an Environmental Protection order to Harare City Council to urgently allocate enough financial, technical and human resources to put out the fire at Pomona dumpsite and the budget allocation should be in relation to the action plan with clear timelines, roles and responsibilities,”Sidange said.

She said that failure to treat the matter urgently will   force EMA to institute further prosecution processes.  “This follows observation of lack of commitment by the local authority to give the matter the urgency it deserves despite the environmental effects of the on-going fire, chief among them being pollution from the smoke emanating from the fire,” she said.

EMA has conducted ambient air monitoring over three days at strategic locations to ascertain the level of pollution by the fire using micro-dust samplers. The results indicated that the 24 hour Mean for Ground Level Concentrations (GLC) of PM10 was over the Standard Association of Zimbabwe (SAZ) prescribed limit and higher than the World Health Organization (WHO) guideline.

 “This is seriously outside permissible levels of pollution from the dumpsite fire indicating a high probability of serious environmental and human health implications, hence the burning of the dump should be classified as an environmental emergency and should be given the urgency it deserves,” Sidange said. According to EMA, this presents an urgent need for intervention in order to protect people’s constitutional right to an environment that is safe and is not harmful to their health.

Before the outbreak of the current fire at Pomona dumpsite, orders were issued to City of Harare to decommission Pomona and to construct a properly lined landfill.  Following failure to comply with the directive, the local authority was brought for a hearing before the Environmental Management Board on various environmental issues including poor waste management in general and Pomona dump site in particular.

According to EMA, poor waste management remains an environmental challenge in most urban local authorities, chief among the drivers of poor waste management is the continued use of unlined dump sites despite the provisions of Statutory Instrument 6 of 2007 which mandated all local authorities to have constructed and using standard sanitary landfills for waste disposal by 31 December 2012.

 The agency says that it has since the expiry of this period served orders to defaulting local authorities with failure to comply with the orders leading to court cases with some cases still pending before the courts.