President Cyril Ramaphosa has described the devastating floods in the Eastern Cape that left 78 people dead and scores missing, as a catastrophic disaster.
Ramaphosa was speaking during his visit to Mthatha, after he visited the area together with key Ministers, the Premier, and local government representatives, visited the area to offer support and assess the damage.
“This is a catastrophic disaster, where the flood just went beyond the banks of the river and rose, more than four metres high and swept through the various houses and killed 78 people.
One of the saddest incidents is that young children’s school transport was swept away, and we lost them.
It is a catastrophe which I do believe could never have been foreseen because as much as the people are close to the river, but they’re quite a distance from the river, about 500 metres,” said Ramaphosa.
Authorities said the disaster has caused significant loss of life and widespread destruction of infrastructure.
Ramaphosa expressed concern that the floods highlighted the urgent need to tackle climate change.
“So, for the river to have burst its banks in the way that it did, it’s quite catastrophic, and it bears testimony to the challenge of climate change that we’re experiencing.
It has never really happened that this time of the year that we should have floods and rain.
Even in Gauteng, we’ve had downpours of rain this time of the year, which we never had.
So, the challenge of climate change is quite huge, and it is affecting the livelihoods of people and infrastructure,” explained Ramaphosa.
The president said government is impressed by how all spheres of government reacted to the disaster, and applauded search, rescue and forensic teams, who helped fast-track postmortems.
“We have pledged that we would assist the victims.
Government will be there to help with shelter now.
We also pay tribute to NGOs and religious leaders who have been on the ground.
There’s been quite a lot of assistant’s activity around this, and this makes us to be more disaster ready, and to some extent we have been, but we need to do more,” remarked Ramaphosa.
