South Africa Gets Hit With Flooding On Top Of Power Outages

South Africa has been getting beat up by heavy rain. Whole neighborhoods are completely under water. Coal mines and power stations are also being flooded.

SABC has reported, nearly 700 homes have been washed away.

The heavy rain has affected operations at the state-run power company. Warnings of more electricity cuts have been forecasted.

Gold and Diamond production has come to a halt at some of South Africa’s leading mines.

Harmony Gold because of the power cuts have had to call off underground shifts. This is known as load shedding in South Africa, and it’s becoming a problem.

Petra Diamonds had this to say about the situation; “We are removing all people from underground, except those required for essential services, with only pumping to prevent flooding and ventilation for safety being allowed.”

Eslom the sate-run power utility said 6,000 megawatts of electricity was going to get switched off. Which makes up roughly 10% of the electrical grid.

Jan Oberholzer the chief operations officer at Eskom had this to say;

“The outlook for this week is to maintain load shedding because of the weather, because of the coal handling challenges that we’ve got.”

The weather bureau of South Africa is warning of further flooding in Gauteng and many other provinces.

Two river banks flooded over submerging nearly 700 homes built with rickety material in the neighborhood of Mamelodi east of Pretoria.

People have had to get on top of their cars and the roofs of their homes awaiting emergency services to come and rescue them.

South Africa is the most recent state to be affected by the floods. Close to 300 people have died and 2.8 million people have been affected by the flooding in East and Central Africa.

(Cover photo courtesy of BBC, second photo courtesy of BBC, video courtesy of YouTube and ENCA news, source BBC)