DURBAN, South Africa — Devastating floods killed 259 in the
South African city of Durban and
surrounding areas, a senior government official said Wednesday, after hillsides
were washed away, homes collapsed, and more people were still feared missing.
اضافة اعلان
The heaviest rains
in 60 years pummeled Durban’s municipality, known as eThekwini. According to an
AFP tally, the storm is the deadliest on record in South Africa.
“At the moment the
confirmed figures of people that have perished during this disaster is 259,
across the
KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province,” Nonala Ndlovu, spokeswoman for the
provincial disaster management department told AFP.
President
Cyril Ramaphosa has described the floods as a “catastrophe” and a “calamity”.
“Bridges have
collapsed. Roads have collapsed. People have died... this is a catastrophe of
enormous proportions,” he said, addressing a local community after inspecting
the damage from the floods that have claimed 259 lives.
The search for
missing persons is still going on, said Ramaphosa, promising to “spare nothing”
in dealing with the disaster.
“This disaster is
part of climate change. We no longer can postpone what we need to do... to deal
with climate change.”
“It is here, and
our disaster management capability needs to be at a higher level,” said the
president.
Earlier the
provincial health chief Nomagugu Simelane-Zulu had expressed their “biggest
worry” about the huge toll telling eNCA television that “mortuaries are under a
bit of pressure, however we are coping”.
The
United Methodist Church in the township of Clermont was reduced to a pile of rubble.
Four children from a local family died when a wall collapsed on them.
Other homes hung
precariously to the hillside, miraculously still intact after much of the
ground underneath them washed away in mudslides.
The storm forced
sub-Saharan Africa’s most important port to halt operations, as a main access
road suffered heavy damage.
Shipping containers were tossed about, washed into
mountains of metal.
Sections of other
roads were washed away, leaving behind gashes in the earth bigger than large
trucks.
“We see such
tragedies hitting other countries like Mozambique, Zimbabwe, but now we are the
affected ones,” Ramaphosa said as he met with grieving families near the ruins
of the church.
South Africa’s
neighbors suffer such natural disasters from tropical storms almost every year,
but Africa’s most industrialized country is largely shielded from the storms
that form over the
Indian Ocean.
These rains were
not tropical, but rather caused by a weather system called a cut-off low that
had brought rain and cold weather to much of the country.
When storms reached
the warmer and more humid climate in
Durban’s KZN province, even more rain
poured down.
More than 6,000
homes were damaged.
Southern parts of
the country are bearing the brunt of climate change — suffering recurrent and
worsening torrential rains and flooding.
Read more Region and World
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
