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AUGUST 13 2011

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GUESSWHO’S BEENSPOTTED IN

TOWN?

GIVE MY KIDNEY BACK,HUSBAND TOLD – PAGE 3

OUT OFAFRICA

FILMFEST

UNITED STILLTHE TEAM TOBEAT – TERRY

– PAGE 3 – THE GOOD WEEKEND – PAGES 23 & 25

On the face of it… Frankly fantastic

Poison scare at V&A Joburg’stough guysaim to makeCape saferHENRIETTE GELDENHUYS

A GAUTENG security firm known

for its tough approach to crime-solv-

ing and headed by two former top

cops has launched its first project in

the Western Cape – safeguarding

Stellenbosch.

The company intends to extend

its operations to False Bay suburbs

as well as

Cape Town

itself.

The com-

pany is head-

ed by private

investigators

Piet Byleveld

and Bushy

Engelbrecht.

CSS Tacti-

cal’s crews,

armed with

s e m i - a u t o -

matic rifles,

patrol 14 of

J o b u r g ’ s

northern sub-

urbs in large

black 4x4s.

Now they have

launched their

first operation

in the Western

Cape in cen-

tral Stellen-

bosch, next to

the Eerste

River and

opposite the Coetzenburg sports

grounds, contracted by local guest-

houses.

Engelbrecht, a former police

major general, said the company

intended replicating its Joburg oper-

ation in the Western Cape by deploy-

ing teams in Stellenbosch and

expanding to Somerset West, the

Strand, Gordon’s Bay and Cape

Town.

The unconventional security

firm gets to know the owners, ten-

ants, domestic workers and garden-

ers in a specific area and questions

strangers.

It specialises in stopping crime

before it happens and holds the only

local licence for a sophisticated com-

puter package, iSentry, which uses

cameras to measure the size, shape,

speed and direction of the motion of

objects at a client’s home, and any-

thing that’s unusual.

“The system detected robbers To page 3

RIDING HIGH: Cape Town’s Frank Solomon rides a big wave near Pico Alto in Peru – the second stop of the 2011 Big Wave World Tour. Hewon his semi-final heat but did not make it to the finals that took place on Thursday. The competition was won by American Peter Mel.

PICTURE: ENRIQUE CUNEO

PARTNERS: PietByleveld, above,and BushyEngelbrecht.

SHEREE BEGA

CAPE TOWN’S top tourist destina-

tion, the V&A Waterfront, has been

accused of poisoning patrons, includ-

ing a six-year-old child, after it allow-

ed a deadly, banned pesticide to be

sprayed around a popular restaurant

and its public spaces this week.

The Waterfront management has

confirmed that the spray was used,

but said it did not know it had been

banned. Now several customers have

spoken of being caught in the spray

drift of the pesticide and how they

suffered severe headaches and nausea

within minutes of being exposed to it.

On Monday, the V&A’s mainte-

nance team sprayed Pyrinex 480 EC, a

highly hazardous pesticide, around

plant boxes, flower beds, pavements

and a parking lot.

The active ingredient is chlorpyri-

fos, a deadly organophosphate nerve

toxin, developed during World War II

“to kill people”, according to Jurgen

Schirmacher, the chairman of the

Tatib Foundation, which campaigns

for the safe use of pesticides.

The government banned chlor-

pyrifos in domestic and garden pesti-

cides in May last year. It is allowed in

agricultural pesticides.

A Camps Bay businessman, who

did not want to be identified, said he

had taken his six-year-old son for

breakfast.

“We were sitting behind a pillar

when all a sudden there was this

unbelievable smell in the air.

“I kept turning around and trying

to work out where it was coming

from. There were another two or

three tables around us.

“My son told me, ‘Dad there’s a guy

standing with a mask behind the pil-

lar.’ He must have been 2m behind us.

I got up and chased the guy away.

“For me the fact that the guy was

standing there spraying this stuff

with a mask on, so close to people who

did not know what he was spraying,

made me angry. He moved off and

continued spraying further down.

“When we got home, my child’s

nose started bleeding. Then it bled

again a few hours later. I’m a little

concerned for my son – he seems fine,

but I don’t know the degree of damage

done to him, or to the people sitting

around me.”

A Durbanville housewife, who also

did not want to be named, said she

had been ill in bed since the incident.

“I feel terrible. When I came out of

the dentist’s office, I caught the guy in

the act. He was spraying the pesticide

from a knapsack all over the Mugg &

Bean. When I inhaled the spray, I

immediately got a very bad

headache.”

Moments later, she began vomit-

ing. “How can they spray this stuff

when people are sitting eating lunch

outside and where people are walk-

ing? Children are playing in front of

the shop fronts.”

Her husband, who was in a busi-

ness meeting at the Mugg & Bean, was

now complaining of muscle aches,

neck and back spasms and headaches

while her daughter, who drove her to

the dentist, “feels out of her body”.

The housewife said: “I spent my

whole birthday in bed. I felt like I was

dying… The Waterfront is not a farm.

That is an agricultural concentrate

that is so poisonous it is only allowed

to be used by farmers.

Yesterday the V&A issued a state-

ment confirming that the pesticide

had been sprayed, but added it had

only now been made aware that a

banned pesticide had been “inadver-

tently sprayed on the premises”.

It claimed that it was old stock and

had had the product since 2009, before

it was banned: “We were not aware of

the fact that the substance was subse-

quently banned.”

But a supplier has confirmed that

the numbers on a paper sticker on the

container used at the Waterfront indi-

cated that the product was made in

June 2011.

“Therefore it’s impossible they pur-

chased it in September 2009,” said

Schirmacher. “It has always been a

highly toxic product and only for use in

agriculture, far away from the public.”

Symptoms of poisoning include

headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomit-

ing, diarrhoea, convulsions, muscle

spasms that can lead to muscle paral-

ysis, and in an extreme cases, death

by suffocation. Early or pre-natal ex-

posure is linked to childhood autism

and attention deficit disorder.

Schirmacher said: “Even pest con-

trol operators are not allowed to use

the product as it is highly toxic…

They have thus broken the law.

“There are going to be serious

health problems, further down the

line, for those who were sprayed. The

research done on the effects of chlor-

pyrifos clearly proves that it a highly

hazardous poison, and that it is very

dangerous for young children.”

He said his foundation had discov-

ered that V&A employees “were often

seeing spraying the planter boxes,

flower beds and public areas”.

But the V&A said it was reviewing

its processes to ensure “that some-

thing like this” did not happen again.

Patrons fall sick as Waterfront claims it didn’t know pesticide is illegal

World chaos a touch of the sunLONDON: Rollercoaster financial

markets and the worst riots Britain

has seen in decades have made it

quite a week for a time of year that is

usually so dead the newspapers are

filled with “silly season” tales of

amusing pet antics.

Everyone is pointing fingers – at

blundering politicians, hooded thugs,

disaffected youths, bumbling police

and greedy bankers – but could the

cause for all the madness really be the

star at the centre of our solar system?

The sun has been throwing bursts

of highly charged particles into space

in a phenomenon known as coronal

mass ejections or CMEs. Three large

CMEs prompted US government sci-

entists to warn of solar storms.

“Earth’s magnetic field is still

reverberating from a CME strike on

August 5 that sparked one of the

strongest geomagnetic storms in

years”, website SpaceWeather said.

Some academics have claimed that

such geomagnetic storms can affect

humans, altering moods and leading

people into negative behaviour

through effects on their biochemistry.

It could of course be mere coinci-

dence that this has been a roller-

coaster week on the markets, and

that Britain was rocked by a wave of

ferocious rioting and looting.

But market watchers may take

comfort from the fact that the space

weather forecast yesterday went quiet

again. – Reuters

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