HEAVY rains which started on Sunday and lashed the city for three days have wreaked havoc across the metro, flooding homes, causing structural damage and motor vehicle collisions.
The eThekwini Municipality Disaster Management team has been on the ground, monitoring and evaluating the damage caused to homes and roads around the city.
According to the municipality, there were incidents of mud slides, flooding and accidents, where motorists and commuters spent hours trapped in traffic due to heavy flooding of roads and bridges.
“We have received over 400 reports of power outages from various parts of the city. The faults are largely due to water seeping into our power stations,” said Tozi Mthethwa from eThekwini Municipality. Local areas affected were Cato Manor, Morningside and Mayville.
According to ward 33 councillor, Nicole Graham, the damage has been quite severe across the city.
“We were lucky to not have any extensive damage, with other areas such as Toti being more badly affected, with severe damage. I think there will obviously be stress on the infrastructure in the City as a result of the weather. The tree in Lena Ahrens Road that came down on Monday night was still lying across the road in the morning, which was a bit of a disaster and there was some flooding in lower Umbilo along Oliver Lea Drive. I did a drive around to see if anything needed to be reported, and only noted a lot of debris,” she said.
Graham said it was also really important in these instances for people to follow advice and to be rational.
“I had a lot of reports of where the road was cordoned off in Umbilo and people took the tape off and were trying to drive through the water. It's also concerning that the city's infrastructure doesn't cope very well with such heavy rain, as a lot of drains were blocked and manhole covers were lifting,” she said.
Ward 27 councillor, Martin Meyer, said there hadn't been too much damage reported in his ward.
“I think we are protected by the ridge, as Sydenham and the other areas were more badly affected. I did have a report of a wall which collapsed at Westgate Gardens in Morningside, which is going to take a while to fix,” he said.
On inspection of the wall, Meyer was told it had made a tremendous noise as it came down at around 5.30pm on Monday evening. No one was injured.
