Could we be doing more to anticipate these floods and prepare for them?
Yes. Flooding is not an unusual event. It’s a normal event. The role of government is to protect society from the damage caused by this normal event.
How?
Infrastructure must be developed as part of that buffering of society.
Such as dams to manage flood peaks?
The era of dam building in South Africa is over. All the major dam sites that are available have been used, and the available yield in river systems is not big enough to justify new dams. So dams are not part of the future in South Africa.
Could we be making more strategic use of dams we have, for instance, in Ladysmith?
Dams are important, of course, but Ladysmith is not a dam problem, it is entirely a different problem.
What is the Ladysmith problem?
Very simply put, the Tugela River is always prone to flooding, and the municipal bylaws state that you cannot build any infrastructure within a 20-year floodline, but people have been building infrastructure within that floodline. So the town is being built in a flood zone. We see this in other places like the informal settlement in Alexandra, so every single flood year you get people washed away.
So until they’re relocated this tragedy will play out every year?
Without question. And that’s not even factoring in climate change.
Which will cause much worse and more frequent incidents of rain intensity?
In KZN [KwaZulu-Natal] we stumble from one flood event to another. This is what climate change is going to be all about.
Are we at all ready to cope with this?
I live in Port Shepstone and we’re still trying to fix the damage from 2021, never mind the current damage that happened two days ago. So the answer is no.
We’re quite literally out of our depth?
Yes. Infrastructure is what has enabled civilisation to flourish. Extreme conditions like floods are natural, so government creates enabling conditions to insulate society through basic infrastructure.
So it matters if at local level we don’t have engineers?
We don’t have engineers and we don’t have the political will to enforce basic regulations — like don’t build a structure within a 20-year floodline.
Could we make better use of technology to give us early warning of rain intensity?
We’re living in a world where everything is connected to everything through the internet of things, so without any doubt technology can give early warnings. But in 1994 South Africa lost 25% of its telemetry platform, used to monitor the flow of rivers, because of soft infrastructure failure, and there’s been a long, slow haemorrhage since then. South Africa currently has the instrumentation capability on our rivers equivalent to what we had in the 1930s.
So where do we go from here to mitigate flood damage?
We have to fix our infrastructure, it’s as simple as that.
Basics like stormwater drainage?
The soft infrastructure is probably more important, by which I mean institutions, policies, programmes and decision-making procedures. This is what has collapsed in South Africa, which is making society more vulnerable to extreme events
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