Residents of the South African city of Durban began searching for their belongings in the destroyed houses and clearing the rubble-filled streets after historic floods.
The toll rose to 253 dead, local authorities announced on Wednesday.
“Our morgues are under pressure, but we are dealing with it. Last night, we received 253 bodies in two separate morgues” in Durban, the largest city in Kwazulu-Natal, Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu, a representative of the provincial health department, said in an interview on television.
The heaviest rains in more than 60 years forced the largest port in sub-Saharan Africa to stop operations as the main access road suffered extensive damage.
The containers were turned into mountains of metal.
The United Methodist Church in Clermont County was reduced to rubble. Four children from a family in the neighborhood died when a wall collapsed on them.
Other houses dangled precariously from the slope, miraculously intact after much of the ground had been washed away by landslides.
“We see how these tragedies affect other countries, like Mozambique or Zimbabwe, but now we are the ones affected,” said President Cyril Ramaphosa, who met with families near the ruins of the church.
South Africa’s neighboring countries experience natural disasters from tropical storms almost every year, but this country is protected from the storms in the Indian Ocean.
These rains were not tropical, they were caused by a meteorological phenomenon that brought rain and cold to much of the country. When the storms hit the hotter and wetter climate of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, where Durban is located, it rained even more.
“Some parts of the KZN received more than 450 mm [de chuva] in the last 48 hours,” said Tawana Dipuo of the National Weather Service, nearly half of Durban’s 1,009mm of annual rainfall.
“Today it is still raining in some parts of the province, but in the afternoon it will clear,” Dipuo said.
Durban has barely begun to recover from the deadly riots of July 2021, which left more than 350 dead.
Schools that were not affected by the floods reopened their doors on Wednesday, but there were fewer students. A teacher at an elementary school in the Durban suburb of Inanda said only two of the 48 students attended class.
The provincial government said the catastrophe “caused untold chaos and caused great damage to lives and infrastructure”.
The national police deployed an additional 300 agents in the region, while the air force sent planes to help with rescue operations.
Torrential rains inundated several areas, destroying homes and destroying infrastructure across the city, while landslides forced the suspension of rail services.
The rains flooded the streets, where only the top of the traffic lights were visible. The torrents also destroyed several bridges, washed away cars and toppled houses. In addition, a fuel tanker truck was floating in the sea after being dragged off the road.
More than 2,000 houses and 4,000 “informal” dwellings, or shacks, were damaged.
The southern regions of South Africa, the continent’s most industrialized country, are suffering the consequences of climate change, with torrential rains and recurrent and increasingly intense floods. In April 2019, floods left around 70 people dead.
“We know that climate change is getting worse, we went from extreme storms in 2017 to what were supposedly record floods in 2019, but 2022 has clearly surpassed it,” said University of Johannesburg development studies professor Mary Galvin.
The South African Meteorological Service admitted for its part that “the exceptionally heavy rains (…) exceeded expectations”.
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