Heavy rains and flooding hit South Africa’s east coast on Wednesday, killing at least 306 people, damaging roads and destroying homes.
The tragedy marked “one of the darkest moments in the history” of KwaZulu-Natal province, the regional government said in a tweet.
“We join the families in mourning the lives we have lost as a result of the heavy rains,” the government wrote. “We commend the disaster management teams for the tireless work they have been doing to evacuate affected communities.”
Floods hit KwaZulu-Natal, which includes the coastal city of Durban. Roads cracked and gave way to deep fissures, and a huge pile of shipping containers collapsed into muddy waters, news agency images show.
A bridge near Durban was swept away, leaving people trapped on both sides.
KwaZulu-Natal has experienced extreme rainfall since Monday in what the provincial government called “one of the worst weather storms in our country’s history” in a statement posted on Facebook.
“The heavy rains that have fallen on our land in recent days have caused untold damage and caused massive damage to lives and infrastructure,” he said.
The flooding is a result of slow-moving storm Issa, which has dumped several months of rain on Durban and surrounding cities since Monday. About 450 mm were recorded along the coast of KwaZulu-Natal. In Durban, 307mm fell in just 24 hours, which is more than four times the normal value for the entire month of April.
After a brief break without rain on Thursday, rain is expected to return to the same areas on Friday and will persist through the weekend as a cold front hits the east of the country.
Teams worked to evacuate people in areas that had suffered “slides of mud, floods and structural collapses of buildings and roads,” Sipho Hlomuka, Executive Council member for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs in KwaZulu-Natal, said on Twitter on Tuesday. market.
“Heavy rains have affected power lines in many municipalities, with technical teams working 24 hours a day to restore power,” added Hlomuka.
Flooded power plants were inaccessible in the hard-hit eThekwini municipality, Mayor Mxolisi Kaunda told reporters, while water pipes were also damaged.
The local government has asked private and religious institutions to help with emergency relief operations and has requested help from the South African National Defense Force to provide air support, he said.
The extreme weather comes just months after heavy rains and flooding hit other parts of southern Africa, with three tropical cyclones and two tropical storms in just six weeks since late January. There were 230 reported deaths and one million people affected.
Scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project – which looks at how much the climate crisis may have contributed to an extreme weather event – found that climate change made such events more likely.
“Once again, we are seeing how the people with the least responsibility for climate change are bearing the brunt of the impacts,” WWA’s Friederike Otto of Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment said on Tuesday ( 12), referring to storms in southern Africa.
“Rich countries must honor their commitments and increase the funding needed for adaptation and to compensate victims of extreme events caused by climate change with loss and damage payments,” he added.
This is expected to be a major point of contention at the upcoming international climate negotiations, the COP27 conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November.
Scientists have warned the world should try to limit global warming to 1.5C above temperatures before industrialization some 200 years ago to avoid some irreversible impacts of climate change. Earth is already about 1.2°C warmer.
In Southeast Africa, warming of 2°C is projected to bring about an increase in the frequency and intensity of heavy rains and floods, and an increase in the intensity of strong tropical cyclones, which are associated with heavier rainfall.
With input from CNN’s Amy Cassidy, Jorge Engels and Brandon Miller
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
