Yacht owners who berth at Vittoriosa’s Grand Harbour Marina have discovered that some smells linger longer than others, after an intermittent sewage outflow that dates back to 2008 recently resurfaced creating an “unbearable” stench.
A Water Services Corporation spokesman said when contacted that following reports of a sewage leak close to the Freedom Monument, a deep-sewer team using a crawler camera came across a blockage beneath Vittoriosa square over the weekend.
The blockage, the spokesman explained, was probably “a stone, some rags or some other foreign material”. Clean-up works, he added, would start this morning.
WSC’s statement, however, will do little to alleviate concerns that the problem will reoccur in the future.
E-mail correspondence seen by The Times shows how the problem was flagged as far back as March 2008. Despite WSC’s efforts at solving the problem, the sewage outflow reappeared a year later, in May 2009. WSC technicians were again dispatched to rectify the situation, only for the outflow to manifest itself again last month.
The sewage effluent has made the marina area “unbearable and unusable”, according to a Maltese boat owner. The stench, he said, was akin to living in a public toilet.
He felt the issue was being “taken lightly” by the authorities and questioned the wisdom of allowing such sewage outflow in an area populated by tourists, wealthy boat owners, restaurant patrons and cruise liner tourists brought to Vittoriosa by water taxi.
Grand Harbour Marina general manager Ben Stuart explained how the company had also first raised the issue in 2008. The company had installed an automatic sewage pump at its own expense, and WSC technicians, Mr Stuart said, had replaced all the sewage piping beneath St Lawrence Street. Despite these efforts, the outflow, which Mr Stuart described as “unpleasant but not consistent”, had reappeared.
Vittoriosa mayor John Boxall echoed these sentiments. Although the WSC had changed various things over the past years, the fact that the problem had reoccurred was vexing.
The issue, he said, had to be prioritised. It devalued the town’s natural and historic beauty, not to mention its top class marina, to have a stench of sewage hovering over the area, Mr Boxall argued.
Despite the intolerable stench, WSC’s technicians and engineers come out smelling of roses among those complaining of the problem, including Mr Boxall and Mr Stuart.
There was a sense among all those concerned that there was little that could be done to permanently sort out the issue without drastically renovating Vittoriosa’s sewage piping. In the absence of any such projects, the WSC engineers were doing all they could, Mr Stuart said.
The boat owner who spoke to The Times agreed: “They [the WSC] are trying to rectify the situation, but they perhaps lack the necessary information and ability to solve it once and for all.”
The works undertaken this morning will hopefully go some way towards rectifying the situation for residents, boat owners and patrons.
Removing the blockage beneath Vittoriosa’s square is, however, likely to be a stopgap measure. The issue concerning the aging sanitary infrastructure remains untouched.