At least 10 people have died after flooding caused by torrential rains and other severe weather hit parts of South Africa, and the government has moved to a national-disaster footing to accelerate the response. The authorities said the disaster covered flooding, thunderstorms, high winds and even snowfall that have affected six provinces since May 4, with informal settlements hit especially hard.
The declaration, announced by South African authorities, enables the government to use emergency funds and other resources to deal with the fallout from the severe weather. Officials said the affected provinces included the Western Cape, North West, Free State, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape and Mpumalanga.
On the national level, President Cyril Ramaphosa expressed “deep sadness” over the loss of at least 10 lives, linking the deaths to the severe weather as winter begins in the Southern Hemisphere. In his remarks, Ramaphosa said authorities are “making the best use of science to pre-empt some of these events and to respond to the aftermath.”
In the Western Cape, the province ordered the temporary closure of schools and parts of Cape Town’s Table Mountain tourist attraction as conditions deteriorated. Local officials in the city said on Tuesday that at least 26 informal settlements around Cape Town had been affected by flooding.
They also reported that more than 10,000 structures had been damaged across those informal settlements. Cape Town has been “badly affected,” according to local accounts accompanying the national disaster declaration.
Beyond South Africa, experts have said severe floods across Southern Africa are intensifying, driven by extreme weather patterns. They cited unusually heavy rains in recent months affecting Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe, describing the regional flooding as the worst in years.
The current storm wave follows an earlier disaster declaration by South Africa. In January, South Africa declared a national disaster over torrential rains and floods in the north that killed at least 30 people, damaged thousands of homes and washed away roads and bridges.