Trapped 12 feared for their lives
Motorists spent night caught in heavy snow
TWELVE snow-trapped travellers spent Thursday night fearing for their lives on a frozen mountain pass in the southern Drakensberg mountains.
A work van carrying 10 passengers and a car carrying two people got stuck on Coloanek pass after they drove southwest into heavy snowfall on the R405, which travels towards Mount Frere to the R56 Matatiele-Kokstad route.
But the road vanished under thick wads of snow.
Sinothando Mtshengu, head of disaster management in the Alfred Nzo district municipality, said: “The vehicles were trapped from around 9pm [Thursday] to 9am [Friday].”
“They phoned us at about 9pm saying they wouldn’t continue on the road as the conditions were terrible.”
Mtshengu said the travellers were going to turn back from the high mountainous area they were in.
“But when we went to check the road this morning, they were still there. We used a grader to clear the road in about 30 minutes. This enabled them to drive themselves out.
“Fortunately no one was harmed,” said Mtshengu.
Two bakkies, a Corsa and a Colt, which took the same R405 but going in the opposite direction, north-east, were stuck from 3.30am to 7.30am, said a passenger in the Corsa bakkie, who would only give her name as Nolovuyo.
“I managed to contact disaster management at about 6.30am. They said they were sending a grader to clear the snow, but while we were waiting we saw Quantum taxis were still driving on the road past us towards Mount Frere.
“They were skidding all over but they left tracks in the snow that we thought we could drive on,” she said.
“We were terrified but we didn’t want to wait any longer so we turned around and started following the taxi tracks until we eventually got back to Mount Frere.
“Disaster management phoned us seven times and even sent an SMS but we couldn’t wait to get out. It was too scary,” she explained.
Many provincial mountain passes were closed right into Friday, Mtshengu said.
With little traffic to break up the falling snow on high mountain passes, it quickly built a thick, dangerous layer.