Aerial Photo Shoot 1st June, 2010

Batteleurs Crew Eddie Keizan – Pilot, Richard Strever, www.Zoomphoto.co.za – Photographer
Team UC Berkley IBD Team Samir Janveja, David Schlosberg, Chad Arkoff, Gustavo Botelho
Team Wet-Africa Wet-Africa – Greg Steenveld and Judith Taylor

MISSION

To take SOUL/WET international visiting partner delegates during WET 2010 Global Member Exchange Conference in late May 2010 to clearly show the state of pollution and other impacts on the watercourses prior to our WET Flagship program (to restore the river to its natural health, from its source at Bertram’s to the Crocodile River confluence /Phase 1 of Flagship program FOR THE BENEFIT OF Global WET-Jukskei Implementation partners and SOUL

To view the Jukskei River, it’s Catchment and Johannesburg from the air in assisting with showing our visitors from UC Berkeley the big picture relating to the Jukskei Catchment and the WET-Africa Feasibility study, Quantification and recommendations the IBD Team has undertaken to deliver to SOUL Foundation.

The flight will form an intrinsic part of the monitoring/ recording system describing and quantifying the eco-status of, and improvements to the Jukskei Catchment.

MISSION OBJECTIVES

To map the status of the Jukskei River from source (Bertrams corner queen and Sports) to the Crocodile River Confluence and the main aspects impacting on the Catchment including pollution and river health status, development and irresponsible building practices.
The study includes the hotspots (Alexandra, Diepsloot and Zewenfontein).

The delegate partners and UCB student’s responses will also be used as a major promotional tool for the program and for raising awareness. The four students coming from UC Berkeley and the Global Footprint Network to do a research study with SOUL to establish a baseline value and the transformation of the watercourse.

OUTCOMES

The flight immediately provided a useful Macro level perspective of the area for Wet-Africa. Additionally, the flight has provided high resolution digital photographs which have already helped to identify areas of attention along the waterway and given an important overall indication of the health of the Jukskei. These photographs will be further studied and correlated with satellite maps to create an understanding of the river's situation before Wet-Africa.Org’s clean-up interventions. The waterway is currently in a poor condition with extensive examples of pollution and contamination through human activity resulting in the characteristic green colour of Hartebeespoort Dam.

Wet-Africa.org thanks the Bateleurs for their wonderful support and helping us to understand our waterways better.

It was an incredible experience for the UCB Team to have this opportunity to view the Jukskei River from source in Bertrams to the Confluence of the Jukskei with the Crocodile River, the first 67km WET aims to restore. Our pilot Eddie Keizan was brilliant, bringing the team safely home to solid ground!

Big thanks to Eddie for the fantastic plane and fight, and to Richard Strever for taking great photographs of the Jukskei including the hotspot Alex; capturing the essence of what we wish to show and for having the CD of the footage delivered to our office in Buccleuch.

The Catchment and its current degredated state will be a thing of the past once the WET-Jukskei Flagship River Restoration program commences. We are aiming to start in Alexandra in Sept/Oct 2010 as Phase 1. With the footage from 2009 and 2010 we can show the ongoing degraded state of the watercourse and in future the visible change and the “big picture” of the impact that our work will have.

This gallery can be found on Google Picassa http://picasaweb.google.com/trans4mation.steve/Bateleurs?authkey=Gv1sRgC... -