Flood season: WC govt reluctantly recognises need for maintaining infrastructure

This year’s flood season kicked off fairly hard. The successive cold fronts that struck in May inflicted substantial damage on the province’s agriculture and infrastructure. This year, we got 120 km/h winds and 200–300 mm of rain in 48 hours on what was already saturated ground, as a result of slow rainfall preceding the main storms.

On May 20 the Western Cape government declared the event a provincial disaster, getting some of the necessary funds to patch the worst damage and cope with the human effects. But unlike in previous years, the provincial government has not simply patted itself on the back for a decent disaster management job, but has reluctantly started to recognise the chronic nature of the problem, and the neglect of infrastructrue these past 20 years. Premier Alan Winde criticised national fiscus, arguing that the “rising frequency of extreme weather” requires a shift from reactive relief to proactive investment in resilient infrastructure. With winter still in its early stages, both provincial and national authorities face pressure to complete repairs before further fronts arrive.

In most places around the Western Cape, water channels are in increasingly poor condition, with some repairs being several decades overdue. Often, as in the case of Drakenstein Municipality, the council has deliberately rezoned riverside areas so as to abrogate responsibility for maintaining culverts and bridges, resorting to simple gabiens to patch river banks, which inevitably wash away by the next rainy season.

The Cape’s long-term average annual rainfall is 500–600 mm, with almost all of it falling between May and September. This is not particularly remarkable until you see other regions with similar annual rainfall, like much of England, a notoriously wet and dreary climate. dumping all that water in just a three-month window naturally makes for a more dramatic and bipolar climate. With that in mind, this last storm is particularly unusual: the totals represented 40–60% of the yearly average in just two days.

The human toll has been significant. At least ten or eleven deaths have been confirmed, caused by flooding, collapsed structures and fast-flowing rivers. More than 21,000 dwellings were damaged, directly affecting some 83,000 people. Informal settlements around Cape Town and rural communities in the Garden Route and Central Karoo were particularly hard hit. Displaced residents are being accommodated in community halls and churches.

Agriculture has sustained the heaviest losses, with many fields flooded or eroded, or rural roads made impassable. Preliminary estimates from industry representatives run into the billions of rands. In the big fruit-growing zones (Grabouw/Elgin, Hex River Valley, Ceres, Worcester), flooding and high winds destroyed vineyards, orchards and croplands. Hortgro, the industry body, reports that roughly 150 hectares of orchards were lost outright; some farms recorded the destruction of more than a third of their plantings. More than 75 hectares of high-value topsoil were washed away or rendered unusable. Rehabilitation of damaged irrigation systems, collapsed netting, trellising and silted farm dams is expected to cost at least R350m.

There is also an immediate crisis around cold storage. Some 300,000 tons of export fruit are held in facilities whose power supply has been severed. Farms are spending millions of rands daily on diesel generators to maintain refrigeration. Industry officials warn that without rapid restoration of electricity the fruit will spoil, threatening export revenues and thousands of seasonal jobs.

As most have noticed, infrastructure has been fairly affected too. Major routes, including segments of the N1 and several mountain passes, were closed by washaways and structural failures. Towns such as McGregor and Vredendal were cut off for days. Rerouting of trucks has already imposed an additional R32m in costs on the pome- and stone-fruit supply chain. Electricity and telecommunications networks suffered widespread damage. Although Eskom has restored power to about 72% of affected areas, many rural districts remain without supply.