Africa-Press – South-Africa. The SA Weather Service (SAWS) issued a level 9 warning for the extreme south-eastern parts of KwaZulu-Natal overnight.
The warning was upgraded from a Level 8, issued on Monday night, after the heavy rainfall overnight and Tuesday morning exceeded even the expectations of the southern African meteorological community at large, said SAWS chief forecaster Kevin Rae.
With a level 9 warning, Rae said “disruptive rainfall leading to widespread flooding of settlements, schools, roads, bridges, sinkholes, mudslides, soil erosion and major disruption of traffic is expected over the extreme south-eastern parts of KwaZulu-Natal”.
A level 4 warning was in place overnight for the south-eastern interior of the province.
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“The good news is that, by tomorrow [Wednesday] the current rainfall system will have weakened considerably, heralding a spell of a few days of settled dry weather,” said Rae.
Rae said the overnight rainfall reports from KwaZulu-Natal had underscored the cumbersome and extreme nature of the rainfall, with some 24-hour falls exceeding 200 millimetres.
Rae said a few stations reported 300 millimetres or more.
Some of the highest overnight rainfall measured in KwaZulu-Natal included the King Shaka International Airport (225 mm), Margate (311 mm), Mount Edgecombe (307 mm), Port Edward (188 mm), and Virginia Airport (Durban north) with 304 mm.
“Such rainfall is of the order of values normally associated with tropical cyclones; however, SAWS must strongly emphasise that this system is not tropical in nature, nor is it a tropical cyclone markedly enhanced by the presence of sustained low-level maritime air which has been fed in from the southern Indian ocean, thus driving the system to produce more rainfall.
KZN floods: ‘We didn’t expect that much rain,’ says weather service
“Moreover, the original source of the maritime air was from warmer, sub-tropical parts of the ocean, with a greater capacity to transport moisture, an essential ingredient of any rain-producing system,” Rae said.
The KwaZulu-Natal Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) on Tuesday confirmed that at least 45 people had died due to heavy downpours and flooding across the eThekwini metro municipality.
Cogta MEC Sipho Hlomuka said disaster management teams were working to assist residents who had been trapped as a result of inclement weather conditions.
eThekwini spokesperson Msawakhe Mayisela said more than 2 000 RDP homes had been damaged and more than 4 000 shacks swept away by the floods.
Humanitarian aid group Gift of the Givers said its teams were also on the ground and assisting residents in affected areas.
Founder Imtiaz Sooliman said the team had also visited a family in Tongaat where a woman and three children had been swept away.
Sooliman said three bodies had been found, but one child was still missing.
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