Flood of terrifying memories
HIGHWAY Gardens is quiet. There has been a mass exodus of residents after many homes in the Germiston suburb were destroyed and badly damaged after the now-infamous stormy downpour of November 9.
There are still puddles of dirty water in some of the homes where the two-hour nightmare unfolded.
Those few families who remain are trying desperately to repair their homes, but they won’t be staying because they fear another round of flash floods.
Whenever it rains their children get scared. They know what happened last time.
In the backyard of a house in Swartkops Crescent, two tricycles and a scooter lie abandoned. They do not belong to the family who live on the property and were carried by water from a few streets away. The walls here have felt the might of flooding waters and parts of the suburb were forced into a single homestead.
An elderly couple next door to Lara Geldenhuys’s home on Donald Avenue were trapped in their house during the deluge.
Water oozed into their house with so much force that it slammed all the doors shut and the couple faced a watery grave, said Geldenhuys. But daring neighbours climbed into their home and plucked them to safety. The couple have since left.
The entire suburb looks like a construction site. But Swartkops Crescent suffered the worst, Geldenhuys said. “The road was lifted, everything beneath it washed away and it slammed back down.”
That part of the suburb reminded her of the Hurricane Katrina videos she had seen on the internet. “When the road slammed down, it made a big hole,” she said, adding that if you looked deep enough you could see down to hell.
Geldenhuys and her husband are fixing their home and plan to sell it. They moved into the property in May last year.
Kevin Naidoo, a few houses down the road, was taking a video of the disaster from his front porch when his wall collapsed. Little did he know that water was already soaking his house from the vinyl floor halfway up to his cupboards. Naidoo lived through another disaster with his wife 16 years ago. “A flat we rented caught fire and we nearly burnt to death. Now we have lived through a possible death by water.”
Lyn Buckler, a pensioner, remembers that the water was over 1m high. She took pictures of it flowing into her yard, surrounding her house and seeping into her living room. She stood at the window thinking: “Where do I run to? I can’t swim.
“I watched everything get destroyed by water.”
In her garage, two cars were floating, and banged into one another.
Residents who have remained in the suburb after the flood are signing a petition for the City of Ekurhuleni to fix the attenuation dam and storm-water channel next to their homes.
DA ward councillor Tiziana Plaskitt said the dam was too small. “The stormwater system is under capacity. The damage wouldn’t have been so devastating had the attenuation dam in the area been bigger.”
Plaskitt said the city needed to revise its stormwater plan.