Durban – The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), an organisation based in Wentworth, KwaZulu-Natal, said this week that it views the recent storm which devastated the province as “systemic failure by the government” at a national, provincial and municipal level.
This after homes, buildings and road infrastructure around the province were flooded and destroyed due to heavy rains that started on Friday and receded on Tuesday.
Durban Floods: M7 Highway at Bluff pic.twitter.com/KEHr2pF6JQ
— TrafficSA (@TrafficSA) April 12, 2022
SDCEA,’s Shanice Firmin is of the view that the government failed to plan and provide early warning signs for people, despite knowing some areas were susceptible to flooding.
Durban Floods - M7 Highway https://t.co/JGsfD0NcSH
— TrafficSA (@TrafficSA) April 12, 2022
“What worries us is that the same problems plague our city every time we have an extreme storm. Ever-higher record rainfalls have hit our province in October 2017, April 2021 and last weekend, reaching 200mm in a 24-hour period.
“There are too many cases of poor drainage systems within the city. We lack a serious climate adaptation and resilience strategy in spite of all the absurd hype the municipality generates.
“In South Durban, we still lack evacuation plans, in spite of known flooding in areas like the M4 and N2 highways, Tara Road, the Sapref Refinery, the M9 and South Coast Road. We see that there are still no plans in place, to address the what are increasingly severe weather conditions,” Firmin said.
In 2017, two people died while around 10 went missing in KwaMashu and Umlazi during the floods caused by heavy rains.
On Tuesday, KZN provincial government officials held a multi-disciplinary conference in which it detailed its plan to clean up the city and what actions were being taken in the wake of the floods.
Durban mayor Mxolisi Kaunda said once the city received an alert from the SA Weather Service, it informed the public and put disaster teams on standby.
As the weekend progressed, the storm worsened, however, leaving many residents around the city displaced. Kaunda explained that the city’s call centres were inundated.
“We immediately took a decision to open all halls in our residential areas, to accommodate residents that were displaced. Following a number of reports that were logged in our call centres, the entire system was overwhelmed and it became very difficult for many of our residents to get through.
“It would then be remiss of me not to sincerely apologise to all those who were in need of our assistance but unable to reach us,” the Durban mayor said.
Kaunda said most of the city’s power stations were flooded and work is under way repairing them.
Water treatment facilities, including Umgeni Water, were also damaged. He said it was too soon to account for damages.
As weather reports indicate that Durban had been caught in the eye of what is believed to be a cut-off low storm, CoGTA reports say that around 20 people have died with an unconfirmed number gone missing.
City spokesperson Msawakhe Mayisela said on Tuesday that a number of municipal services were off-line in the wake of the devastation.
Mayisela said that refuse removal, cemeteries, bus services and health care facilities were all affected by the storm and not operational on Tuesday.
IOL