More than 300 people killed in the worst floods in six decades in South Africa rose to more than 300

The devastating floods in South Africa, the worst in decades, have already claimed the lives of more than 300 people, according to the latest official balance released on Wednesday night, which also details that heavy rains destroyed thousands of houses, roads and bridges in Durban, the great African port and the epicenter of the east drama.

According to the latest balance sheet by the Kwazulu-Natal Provincial Disaster Management Office (KZN), 306 people died. The authorities were facing a large flow of corpses in the morgues.

“Our people are wounded. It is a catastrophe of enormous proportions,” said Head of State Cyril Ramaphosa, in Durban.

The heaviest rains in more than 60 years have left a landscape of destruction, with collapsed bridges, landslides and submerged roads around the port city of Durban, the first city of KZN, in the east.

Local authorities are calling for a state of natural disaster to be declared.

Four dead brothers

During his visit, Ramaphosa met with the relatives of the deceased. In Clermont, a poor suburb of Durban where the United Methodist Church was reduced to rubble, he promised government aid to a father who lost his four children when part of his house collapsed.

The man told the head of state how the water rose in the middle of the night, how the electricity went out and how he could not save his children, asleep in another room of the house.

Dozens of people are missing, and first responders talk about a “nightmare”.

Precipitation forced the port, the largest port in sub-Saharan Africa, to halt operations, as the main access road was severely damaged.

The transport containers were lying on the ground, turned into metal mountains.

“We see how these tragedies hit other countries, such as Mozambique or Zimbabwe, but now we are the ones affected,” Ramaphosa said.

South Africa's neighbouring countries suffer such natural disasters from tropical storms almost every year, but South Africa is protected from storms in the Indian Ocean.

These rains were not tropical, but caused by a meteorological phenomenon that brought rain and cold to much of the country. When the storms reached the hottest and wettest weather in KZN province, it rained even more.

450 mm in 48 hours

“Some parts of KZN have received more than 450 millimeters [of rain] in the last 48 hours,” said Tawana Dipuo, from the National Weather Service, nearly half of Durban's 1,009 mm of annual rainfall.

“Today it is still raining in some parts of the province, but in the afternoon it will clear up,” according to Dipuo.

Durban was barely recovering from the deadly riots of July 2021, which claimed more than 350 lives.

At least 140 schools were affected by the floods, according to local authorities. The rest reopened their doors on Wednesday, but there were fewer students. A teacher from the Durban suburb of Inanda said that only two of the 48 students showed up for class.

The provincial government stated that the catastrophe “caused incalculable chaos and caused great damage to lives and infrastructure.”

The national police deployed 300 additional officers in the region, while the air force sent aircraft to assist in rescue operations.

Waterspouts flooded the streets, where only the upper part of the traffic lights was visible. A fuel tanker was left 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 areas of southern South Africa, the continent's most industrialized country, are suffering the consequences of climate change, with torrential rains and recurrent and increasingly intense flooding. In April 2019, the floods left about 70 people dead.

“We know that climate change is getting worse, we went from extreme storms in 2017 to having what were supposed to be record floods in 2019, but 2022 clearly exceeds it,” said Professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, Mary Galvin.

(John Mkhize, Rajesh Jantailal y Phill Magakoe - AFP)

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