Roads and other infrastructure has been damaged and at least 253 people have died. (Photo by PHILL MAGAKOE / AFP)
From where she stood on Tuesday, all that uMzinyathi resident Tiny Mungwe could see was devastation. The four houses visible to her had collapsed and the gravel roads she and her neighbours use to get water and food were destroyed.
She lives in Maphephetheni village near Inanda Dam and the uMzinyathi River in KwaZulu-Natal and the extreme four-day rainfall and flooding have left her shaken.
The heavy rains in the eThekwini metro and nearby areas, which the South African Weather Service says took its forecasters by surprise, have so far resulted in the deaths of 253 people, among them children, according to the province’s health MEC Nomagugu Simelane.
“It’s devastating,” Mungwe said. “A lot of the thoroughfare for getting to the city is flooded. The one thing that affects absolutely everyone is that there are no supplies. We can’t travel to the city to get things. A lot of the households here, including my own, rely on water that is delivered. So now, if the road is damaged, how will we get water?”
The floods had devastated many informal settlements and some rural areas, the shack dwellers’ movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, said in a statement.
“Huge numbers of people have lost their homes and all their possessions and are now entirely destitute. People living near rivers were worst affected … Many people have been unable to go to work,” it said.
Poor road infrastructure
Even before the current devastating floods in the eThekwini metro, summer rains that started in November were aggravating the state of local roads, said Kulani Siweya, chief economist at AgriSA.
“There will be a pothole that has been fixed, but the smallest amount of rain will open it up again a few days later. The floods in KwaZulu-Natal will make these kinds of conditions even worse.”
Wandile Sihlobo, chief economist at the Agricultural Business Chamber, said the floods have exacerbated the existing reality of poor road infrastructure in South Africa.
“This will increase the transaction costs of agricultural products in terms of transport,” he said, adding that because of poor road maintenance, farmers were redirecting their time and resources to maintaining roads, water and other services that should be the responsibility of the public sector.
According to Siweya, farmers are investing on average R200 000 out of their own pockets to fix roads and infrastructure.
“Farmers do not have any alternative, such as rail; 95% of produce is transported via national and provincial roads,” said Siyewa, noting that national roads were meant to be maintained by the South Africa National Roads Agency and provincial roads by the department of transport, but this was not being done properly.
He added that, from engine and trailer damage, to shorter vehicle lifespan and accidents, the effect of poor road maintenance on produce in transit affects food security in general.
“Farmers are moving produce that is delicate and perishable, and farmers get penalised for fruit that is not up to standard as a result of poor road maintenance,” Siyewa said, adding that the government has not been forthcoming in addressing road maintenance.
“We have sent emails, letters, even tried to make phone calls, and nobody answers. We’ve now made it a point to get this information to the desk of the presidency, because it seems that no one below the presidency is doing anything,” he said.
Other provinces with big fruit producers such as Limpopo rely on the national roads to transport produce to consumers and supermarkets, Siyewa said.
Spectre of climate change
While the torrential rainfall cannot be attributed to climate change, these extreme events can “be expected to recur in the future” and with increasing frequency because of climate change, the South Africa Weather Service said.
“As weather scientists we cannot attribute individual weather events occurring on short timescales to longer-term events. However, notwithstanding [this], we can state with confidence that globally — as a direct result of global warming and associated climate change — all forms of severe and extreme weather are becoming more frequent and more extreme than in the recent past.”
Professor Tafadzwanashe Mabhaudhi, a climate expert at the School of Agricultural, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, agreed that it would be wrong to attribute a single event such as the KwaZulu-Natal floods to climate change, but added: “We can tell that as a result of global warming and climate change, that the frequency and intensity of these weather extremes is becoming more pronounced.”
This week, a rapid attribution analysis by an international team of leading climate scientists under World Weather Attribution found that climate change made extreme rainfall heavier and more damaging during five back-to-back storms in January and February in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique. More than a million people were affected, with 230 reported deaths.
According to Mabhaudhi, South Africa has not built the preparedness capacity to better anticipate and prepare for these hazards so that they don’t become disasters. Instead, the focus is on relief, “which is what is happening now”.
“What we need to be investing in is building the necessary capacity to ensure that we are prepared. We know for sure it’s going to happen again, but we might not know how soon … we need to be better prepared so that we can prevent the loss of lives, loss of property,” Mabhaudhi said.
South Africa ill-prepared
Mabhaudhi noted that KwaZulu-Natal’s premier, Sihle Zikalala, had established a climate change council, but said it required consolidation to build momentum and more tangible results on the ground.
“Next time when we have a flood like this, we should be talking a different story that says: ‘You know in 2022 we had floods, we lost X number of lives, property; this time around we had a similar scenario, but because we were prepared the losses were mitigated,’ ” he said.
But for now, preparedness is lacking: “For example, the South African Weather Service was able to correctly forecast and issue out the warning, but the question then is were the disaster management systems then able to respond to the warning and put in place measures to protect infrastructure and people timeously?” Mabhaudhi said.
“Were we able to differentiate the warning at a regional level so now that the warning has been issued for KZN, which particular areas of KZN are at risk of flooding in this situation, and then to deploy adequate resources into those places to protect infrastructure and people?”
The provincial floods also highlight the limited capacity in the disaster management services, he added. “We need a new form of capacity within disaster management services … to build that capacity for level of preparedness and also to build the response capabilities so they are able to respond more effectively to early warnings.
“What we learn every time is that it affects people at local levels. So the national early warning systems need to be linked to community-based early warnings, so that communities that are at risk of flooding are able to receive these messages on time and are trained and equipped to respond to such warnings.”
Desperate: Rescuers dig for people believed to be trapped at a house in Bonela in Cato Manor, Durban, which collapsed after heavy rains. (Photo by RAJESH JANTILAL / AFP)
Building climate resilience
From a town planning perspective, climate resilient infrastructure that “can handle these heavy downpours when they do occur, now knowing that they are occurring and will occur” is key.
Mabhaudhi noted that most of the settlements prone to flooding and landslides are informal ones, typically in low-lying areas close to rivers or steep slopes.
“What we know is that climate change is also a driver of rural-urban migration because we’re experiencing drought and crop failures in rural areas,” he said.
“People are going to move away from rural areas … and move into urban areas where we now have these informal areas growing. We need to understand and anticipate the migration of people into urban areas, look at the infrastructure within urban areas to say, can it handle the influx of people and how do we start planning our settlements in a way that doesn’t put people and their assets at risk.”
Perfect storm
Liesl Dyson, an associate professor in meteorology at the University of Pretoria, said the extreme rainfall that unleashed the widespread flooding was an “anomaly”.
Agrometeorologist Dr Alistair Clulow, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said there were lessons for the province to learn.
“We allow houses to develop in areas where water builds up, particularly on low-lying land. The city environment causes a lot of rapid runoff because there are so many hard surfaces such as roads, parking lots and buildings.
“Normally where you would get infiltration now you don’t. You just get rapid run-off,” he said.
“We’re getting bigger rainfall events because of climate change and we’re also not maintaining the structures we’ve built like stormwater drains and allowing them to fill with rubbish.
“We can’t put highways through low-lying land where water tends to accumulate. We need to have green zones within our cities where there are plants that can attenuate flooding. We don’t have that. We just built up the city and it’s all just tar, cement and concrete … with greater potential for flooding. We will pay the price if we don’t plan better.”
uMzinyathi resident Mungwe that every year now seems to bring an unexpected extreme weather event on the east coast.
“What it clearly shows is that we’re suffering the fallout of climate change. It’s really messed up that the people producing the least amount of carbon emissions in the world are the people who have to deal with the worst of it,” an upset Mungwe said.
President Cyril Ramaphosa echoed that sentiment during a tour of storm-ravaged parts of the province on Wednesday, telling reporters: “We see such tragedies hitting other countries like Mozambique, Zimbabwe, but now we are the affected ones.”
He said the government would help families devastated by the flooding that has wiped out homes, businesses, roads, bridges and water and electricity infrastructure.
The weather service warned of more bad weather ahead, saying on Friday, an upper trough was expected to intensify, resulting in the development of an extensive band of isolated to scattered showers and thundershowers over much of the central interior of South Africa.
“Consequently, North West, Free State, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal are likely to experience the return of thunderstorms, along with the risk of localised flooding and/or occurrences of hail and strong, damaging winds,” it said.
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