Harpbeespoort Dam On The Way to Pilanesberg
Harpbeespoort Dam
My “transfer” driver Aaron gave me a wonderful surprise. He brought me by this river and I was in awe! It was a deep green and it looked magnificent. It reminded of a scene out of Harry Potter. It hit me then, and I will get back to this in a minute…
I could only see a partial view of the river at first and the houses built into the mountainside.
As we continued to move forward I started to notice something else.
A dam!
Okay now back to what hit me. The water looked absolutely beautiful but we normally don’t see green emerald water in a river like this. I wrote about this condition in my book The God-Awakening Diet where unnatural amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer runs off land and ends up in the coastal ocean.
This causes a series of reactions that promote excessive algae growth and the algae uses up all the oxygen in the water and kills the aquatic life in the river.
I later researched the dam and found out something similar was happening there. The dam is renowned for its poor water quality which floods the Crocodile River with phosphates and nitrates that feed the algae.
Though the water looks awesome, the unbalance of nutrients caused by man-made intervention is destructive to the other aquatic life in the river.