The City of Cape Town is offering cut-price burials if you are prepared to share a grave.
|||The City of Cape Town is offering cut-price burials if you are prepared to share a grave.
And if you want 40 percent off the price of a burial plot, take the option of a “densified” burial area.
These are some of the measures the city council has taken to try to cope with the more than 10 000 bodies which must be buried every year in a city where the older cemeteries are running out of space and where most citizens do not want to be cremated.
Susan Brice, in charge of the city’s cemeteries, said on Tuesday 60 percent of Capetonians opted to be buried and about 40 percent cremated.
“In Europe and the UK over 90 percent of bodies are cremated. There is no cultural opposition to it, as there is here,” Brice said.
Capetonians can buy burial plots, which their families could open up at a later stage to bury a second person on top of the first coffin. Second burials caused no disturbance to the first coffin in any way, she said.
“These are merely options. We are trying to guide people in the direction of the most cost-effective and space-effective options. We encourage second burials in families. We give them a cost incentive to open the old grave rather than the new one and re-use the family grave.”
These shared graves were limited to two coffins a grave plot, because Cape Town had the added problem of a high water table. Coffins buried too deep could contaminate the underground water.
“When old cemeteries were built, they never considered that this might cause contamination of underground water. But underground water moves through the ground and ends up somewhere else,” Brice said.
The city has put down well points in the cemeteries with high water tables and its scientific services keep tabs on the water quality.
Another option the city is offering is to “go up” by using above-ground crypts. The city built 144 mausoleum crypts in Maitland cemetery last year which “are now officially on offer to the public”. Booking inquiries are open.
“These are fully managed in terms of odour, with carbon activated filters. It is a more environmentally friendly way of decomposion, because of the saving of space.”
The city buries 900 bodies a month on average and 700 are cremated. It has extended graveyards in Khayelitsha, Grassy Park and Welmove, and built new cemeteries in Wallacedene and Delft. More are on the cards for Somerset West and Mfuleni.
And the city is to add a new clause in the bylaw which makes it possible for people to offer graves to the city if they no longer need them.
A case in point was a woman in her 80s, who was returning to live in Germany, and said she and her descendants no longer needed the graves in Hout Bay cemetery where her parents and grandparents were buried.
“She was surprised when I said we don’t have the authority to take them back. In Germany they have a 30-year recycling policy where you forfeit the grave after that time.”
melanie.gosling@inl.co.za
Cape Times