Skip to main content

Flooding in South Africa

The rains have been pretty intense around here recently, though not nearly so much as elsewhere in South Africa:
According to South Africa's government, at least 40 people have been killed across the country and more than 6,000 displaced by flooding that has submerged houses, roads and crops since December.

Officials estimate the damage to infrastructure and agricultural produce will cost the country millions of dollars, and forecasters predict more rain is on the way.

The South African Weather Service said most of the country's rivers, dams and reservoirs have reached their capacity, and any additional rainfall is expected to cause further flooding.

Meteorologists blame the downpours on La Nina, a weather pattern associated with recent wet conditions around the world.
I'm in little danger here, as the Moshaweng Valley (which is usually dry) would have to flood to something like 100,000 cfs before it reached my house. (I am somewhat-selfishly hoping for at least a day of medium flow.) Further downstream, though, the Orange River is going gangbusters:
Another two people were missing and around 400 were evacuated after the Orange River flooded between Upington and Kakamas in the Northern Cape.

Spokesman for the Siyanda district municipality Gilbert Lategan said police divers and air force personnel were on the look out for two people apparently missing after walking near the flooded river.

Some 400 residents on 21 islands had been moved to higher ground or places of safety in the district in the past week.

At the Keimoes school hostel people were given food and shelter. Another 65 were been accommodated at the Roman Catholic hall at Kanon Island.

Some 100 people from Pokkies Island near Upington were also helped with food and shelter.
Here's hoping people stay out of harm's way.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that