Future KZN natural disasters can be mitigated, experts say

Developing an information base that details all the disaster-prone areas in KwaZulu-Natal has been labelled as one of key interventions that could help minimise future natural disasters.

With the rebuilding of the flood-ravaged province estimated at more than R6bn, experts in town planning and civil engineering believe that this could be one of the key initiatives that could help the province to anticipate future disasters and be able to respond adequately.

Prof Philip Harrison, Wits' SA Research Chair in spatial planning and city planning, said although KwaZulu-Natal is a complicated province due to, among others, water it gets flowing from the Drakensberg mountains, it has an unstable geology.

Harrison said approvals of new developments should no longer be based on what could be the worst floods in 100 years as that's normally the norm. “With the problem of climate change we need to revise this to 50 years... we need to strengthen our planning systems,” Harrison said.

He said a detailed mapping of where a disaster happened previously would help with regards to responding better in future. “We need to keep the new developments away from risk, even though there's no perfect solution because KZN is too different,” Harrison said.

Professor of civil engineering at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Mohamed Mostafa, said the disaster has exposed that there was a poor disaster management strategy, poor infrastructure maintenance and poor infrastructure upgrade plan which have to be addressed in the rebuilding process.

“We need a disaster management strategy which is not based on reaction but on forecasting and interventions to minimise the effects. It must also allow for immediate actions to be taken,” Mostafa said.

Mostafa said over the years, maintenance and upgrade of ageing infrastructure in KZN have not been attended to properly and that needs urgent proper attention. “Generally speaking, we have world-class standards and design methods. However, construction and maintenance can affect the design negatively,” Mostafa said.

He said planning was also “an essential aspect of design which should be driven by science and engineering and not by politics”.

“The professionalisation of local government is a much-needed action taking into account the specialisation as well. We need to consider other measures like different designs for our strategic roads, for example port and airport access roads,” he said.

Mostafa said the roads have been designed to carry the expected traffic but not to withstand unexpected scenarios like severe floods. He called for the planning of these roads to be relooked at as alternative accesses should be part of the planning.

Prof Yunus Ballim from Wits School of Civil & Environmental Engineering said the roads and bridges are generally well designed in the province “but clearly not for this severity of flooding”.

“There may be a need for more careful attention to maintenance and management of the storm water system in urban areas by engineers and technologists in public, local and provincial authority structures,” Ballim said.

He said “the recovery process will be slow and good engineering competence will be essential”.

“No drastic actions are needed... just careful and good engineering, implemented with proper attention to construction quality and hygienic procurement processes.”

Ballim said an important feature of this KwaZulu-Natal disaster is the reality that the most affected people are the poor and marginalised of society, mainly because they live in higher risk areas.

“My sense is that engineers and policy developers involved in urban planning and infrastructure development should give more careful attention to the areas where people live and the levels of exposure to risk of harm from natural events like floods,” Ballim said.

There are already 1,300 road repair projects that have to be undertaken after the infrastructure was severely damaged by the floods.